Jain Quotes

It was very liberating, living in a foreign country, a place where everything was new and strange - the food, the customs, the climate, everything.

China was the first time I truly felt like an outsider. I fell in love with the process of trying to become intimate with the culture.

I was very surprised when I first started spending time in America. The culture shock was something I wasn't prepared for. I had a lot of work to do to try to begin to understand this enormous and complex country that I thought would be an easy process.

I couldn't settle in Italy - it was like living in a foreign country.

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.

Everything in Asia is a culture shock, it's very different from North America, but it's great to be forced into a situation to meet new people and learn new techniques.

When I left the U.S. for the first time, I spent my first year abroad in Japan. That culture shock and abundance of new stimuli combined with a lack of guidance forced me to develop my own approaches to learning and juggling.

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.

I remember that coming to America was scary for me because everything here is just bigger, better, shinier, you know?

I enjoy very much being in a foreign country, in a new country, new place. And I enjoy also beginning a new book. It's like being someone else.

I thought I knew everything when I came to Rome, but I soon found I had everything to learn.

It's difficult to adapt to Barcelona.

When I was 16 I took the first opportunity I had to play basketball in a different country. I flew to Europe for the first time and found myself in the small town of Macon, in France. That was the first time I lived far away from my people, from my culture. I was young and had to adapt quickly.

When I moved from Canada to Korea, I experienced a massive culture shock. I wasn't familiar with Korean culture at all and was very surprised at the hierarchical elements of Korean culture. However, at the time I was determined to succeed so I became a sponge and just soaked in everything I could.

Everything has changed since I came to China.

I had the urge to examine my life in another culture and move beyond what I knew.

All I know is that every time I go to Africa, I am shaken to my core.

I'm dying to go to India... because the culture seems so vastly different from what I'm used to in the States. I would love to do some yoga there. And be amongst people who are so different than myself. There's so much you can learn from people who grew up in a different environment.

When you visit a foreign city you are in it, but not of it, separated by a glass wall. Once, while a student, I was getting dressed in my ground-floor room when a family of Italians crossed the grass to watch, as if I were laid on for their amusement and instruction.

Everyone who's in America spends the first few years not experiencing it. The person is frightened by the newness of the place and doesn't see things. Her emotional universe becomes the entire universe. And then when she thinks of home, her distance in space can seem like a distance in time.

I lived in England to learn English. When I went to England for the first time, it was like being on the Moon. I had no friends, I couldn't speak the language. I was very isolated.

Travel early and travel often. Live abroad, if you can. Understand cultures other than your own. As your understanding of other cultures increases, your understanding of yourself and your own culture will increase exponentially.

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.

When you travel, remember that a foreign country is not designed to make you comfortable. It is designed to make its own people comfortable.