"Travel does what good novelists also do to the life of everyday, placing it like a picture in a frame or a gem in its setting, so that the intrinsic qualities are made more clear. Travel does this with the very stuff that everyday life is made of, giving to it the sharp contour and meaning of art.” – Freya Stark


And so channeling Freya Stark, a woman who knew a little something about travel, I love to go to grocery stores when I travel. The juxtaposition of the familiar with the foreign crystallizes the differences between my everyday(quotidian!!) experience and an everyday (quotidian!!!) experience in the country I am visiting. Going to the movies in a foreign country is another way to experience the dissonance. Although, since most of the movies on offer seem to be American it can be a sharp dissonance to emerge from a movie theater having been watching an American movie and walk out onto the pavement in an African country. I've done it, it's weird. But incredibly memorable.