The complaints about colonialism felt like more of that combined with a complainer who’s never been out of the states and so has an over exaggerated notion of the romanticism of the exotic… as if foreign is different in some fundamental way than not-foreign.    On the contrary, what has struck me most about being overseas is how quickly “exotic” disappears.  People are very much people.   Everything is mundane for the people living it.   No one thinks of themselves as exotic.

If I had to be annoyed by something in the comments it would actually be the breathless, “Oh you’re so brave, I could *never* go live in a place like that,” declarations.    But that’s because I have an attitude problem. 

Makes me think of Drew Barrymore waxing poetic about taking a dump in the rain forest.