Michael Arden Quotes

I still make sure to go, at least once every year, to a country where things cannot be taken for granted, and where there is either too much law and order or too little.

Going through different places, I stopped through Dubai and stayed there overnight. There I had an ultra-culture shock.

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.

When I was 17, I went to India for six weeks and had what, at the time, was a very challenging trip. You walk down the street and you see lepers and beggars, and there were several of us, a group of Americans. I remember we were just trying to park one night somewhere and people were just sleeping in the parking lot.

My life experiences are different than the average person because I've spent the last 10 years living in Mexico. I generally don't know what's going on in America, and when I do visit for work, I'm often interrogated about my life choices by random strangers.

Visits to crowded Indian urban centers unleash sensory assaults: colorful dress and lilting chatter provide a backdrop to every manner of commerce, from small shops to peddlers to beggars.

I love travelling, but I have to admit I didn't initially take to Agra in India. As soon as you arrive, someone wants to show you around, take your bags or sell you something - and it's just a bit of a culture shock. You just have to make the necessary mental adjustment to the setting.

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.

Going to Liberia really changed a lot for me. I didn't realize what was happening on the same planet. My understanding that in the world everything is interconnected really grew - to go to one of the poorest countries from one of the richest countries in the world. It was two worlds apart.

The first thing to recognize not just about Afghanistan but about any poor undeveloped country is that as big as it looks on the map, it's much bigger when you're there.

If you're eight and you live in Los Angeles and everybody has toys and you go to a country that has a Marxist dictatorship and there are no toy stores and nobody speaks English and it's blazing hot every day and they only have fish, which you don't like, then you tend not to appreciate the cultural lessons you're learning.

I have been to Turkey almost every summer holiday of my life and pretty much only on summer holidays, which makes me a very shallow Turk indeed.

We moved to Australia for two years though and that was a little bit tough trying to fit in.

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

I'm very comfortable in the U.S. and Europe, but I feel completely out of place in the rest of the world, mostly because I never spent time outside the U.S. and Europe until I was in my 30s.

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 love Europe. I don't speak a lick of French, but I speak a bit of Italian. I can get through Italy better than I get through the rest of Europe.

When I went to Germany, all I knew were German swear words.

It was very confronting after growing up in the suburbs of Melbourne, then going to India. There's such a different emphasis on everything: food, family, hygiene, love, marriage. It's why it's so exciting, why it's so beautiful.

Moving from Dubai to the Congo was one of the best things that happened to me, it's a shock to be confronted by the contrast in wealth and culture, and it's hard, but I loved it and it influenced me a lot.

Angie visited Ethiopia and it changed her life. It's hard for her to go home to a very expensive restaurant and order freely.

I'm not comfortable holidaying in other people's poverty.

I had consumed a lot of American culture, but I was not quite prepared for the reality of American poverty.

Get to know the poor in your country. Love them. Serve them.