You experience other cultures to give you a kind of shock that makes you look at your own culture. You appreciate it more as a result of being out of it, but you also realise there are some things lacking in your culture.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
Culture means, I think, that you have widened your experience enough through reading and through being a little bit thoughtful about these things that it has changed your outlook in some ways. And not necessarily made you a better human being but made you see things.
It's very, very hard to affect culture. And you can get surprised thinking you're farther down the path of change than you really are because, frankly, most of us like the way things are.
I guess, like most foreigners, when you're away, you see your own culture being even more strange. But where I come from and my roots mean a lot. I miss my family and my friends. Something I've realized as I've been traveling is that it's more about the actual people than the actual place.
Culture is a way of coping with the world by defining it in detail.
If you see in any given situation only what everybody else can see, you can be said to be so much a representative of your culture that you are a victim of it.
I really hold on to my culture because it is what made me.
There are lots of stories about my culture that I think bring a whole other perspective to who we are and where we have been and how we got here that I think need to be done.
The culture is just so coarse that you have to take it to that level and people will be like, 'Whoa!' And then you can make people think about stuff. It's kind of like shock therapy.
We should never denigrate any other culture but rather help people to understand the relationship between their own culture and the dominant culture. When you understand another culture or language, it does not mean that you have to lose your own culture.
I don't think you lose culture because you act different cultures.