Stranger in a strange land

What’s your favorite part about visiting a new place — the food? The architecture? The people watching?

When you visit a new place, you have the opportunity to be a new you.  You are not going to grow six inches, instantly lose thirty pounds, or change your skin color (except tanning I guess!), but you are on new ground.  (Now, I suppose if people know you, or of you, in the new place, this regeneration is more limited.)  For me,  I started to notice this in the romance department.  I went to London during, or just after, high school.  Our school went with another school.  Somehow, by the end of the trip I had a generally flirtatious rapport with the girls from the other school, and specifically actualized flirtatious rapport with a certain lady.  I was ecstatically dumbfounded and felt like I was soccer: far more popular in Europe than the United States.  This trend further evinced itself in a mission trip to Mexico where a local young lady seemed ready to marry me by the end of the trip!  I have to believe that her awareness of the impracticalities of the situation made this more than a green card fancy.  Was my game really internationally superior?  Was the United States really the kryptonite of my swag?  What was the disconnect?  I guess when things are new to me that also means I am new to others.  The final frontier of romance turned out to be the true wild west: the Internet.  Yep, I am one of those people.  I always thought it was silly, lame, and creepy, but I guess it was the right silly, lame, and creepy.  The thing about marriage is that it is an unexplored wilderness for me, and just when I set up an outpost some new forest must be explored.  Baby number two on the way!  There will always be a struggle because as the saying goes: wherever you go, there you are.