Abigail Washburn Quotes

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.

I remember going to Taiwan for the first time and... I didn't realize that everyone looked like me here and what that'd feel like.

Going to the U.A.E. for the first time was a real cultural shock. Everything was different. People didn't speak my language, it was all new, a huge change. But I loved it.

I have always felt more at home in a culture that has nothing to do with the one I was born and brought up in.

You can feel as brave as Columbus starting for the unknown the first time you enter a Chinese lane full of boys laughing at you, or when you risk climbing down in a Tibetan pub for a meal of rotten meat.

The only time I used to feel like an outsider was when I first went to India.

The first condition of understanding a foreign country is to smell it.

I, made in England, felt excluded, miffed, resistant to the idea of even visiting India, a position of increasing absurdity as, one by one, backpacking friends returned from the place with the standard anecdotal combo of nirvanic epiphany and toilet horror.

I loved France, although I initially thought they were stubborn for always speaking French.

When I went to Australia, I had this feeling, like, 'Wow, this is really a different country.' I think that feeling of genuine foreignness, that this is a very different culture, which is increasingly rare in our globalised world.

I had a hard time convincing students that they were going to North Africa to understand the North Africans, not to understand themselves.

I make it my business to see or do something cultural in every place I go to. If you don't, you'll get into a state of constant despair.

It's fascinating when you're from another place, but you don't speak the language.

Part of me wonders what it would have been like to have had my first experience of India in a normal way, rather than through the eyes of a film.

It is an agreeable and yet a painful sense of novelty to stand for the first time in the midst of a people whose language and manners are different from one's own.

I was first in Sydney in 1993, and have been a few times since then. For someone who didn't know Australia, it came as a shock how intelligent, interesting and funny the people were. If I lived there I might see it differently, but as a visitor it was a lot of fun.

I find it very beautiful to work in different countries because I see the mentality differences there. It is so rich, one always carries forward something.

I remember learning new words, trying to figure out what common things like cider, finding myself upset that my parents couldn't help me understand this new culture, that it was up to me to interpret for them as well as myself.

Whenever I visited China in the past, the relationships always felt superficial; there was no time where I felt those moments of conflict and delight that make you feel close to another person. But since I started touring there in 2004, I would always collaborate with local musicians, and that opened up a new level of intimacy.

I wanted to know what it would be like to get on a horse and ride all the way west to Europe and take a look back at my own culture through the eyes of a nomad.

China is a company of contradictions. Nothing is what it appears to be. We have to be extremely respectful when we go overseas.

Other people's traditions look charming and decorative and exotic. They're nice places to visit on holiday, but you wouldn't want to live with one.

I didn't realize how interesting the place I come from is until I left home and saw how other cultures handled things differently.

I want to go to a country where I don't speak the language. I want to be lost in translation.

Even if Pearl S. Buck hadn't spent most of her life in China, she'd have every right to write about it.