“That sounds so much more exotic than here!”

My first trip to England was in the summer of 2013. I spent all of June and July there, embedded with a team at Fujitsu in Bracknell, Berkshire, designing an NCR self-service checkout system for the UK Post Office. I stayed at a hotel in Bracknell and walked to the Fujitsu office each morning. It was nice to be outside of London and all of its hustle and bustle. Other than the fact that I was living in a hotel, it was like being a part of the community. I got outside and walked all around the town whenever I could.

For a kid who grew up in a small town in the American deep South, England was exotic. The accents were different. The food was different. The architecture was different. The culture was different. Everything was different, and I loved it.

Over the course of my two months there, I got to know pretty much all of the staff at the hotel. On my last day, when I went down to breakfast, I told the maitre'd that I was going home. She asked where home was, and I said, “Atlanta.” She sighed wistfully. “Oh, that sounds so much more exotic than here!”

That was quite a wake-up call. I had just spent two months as a foreigner in a country which, until then, I had only read about or seen in movies and on TV. Everything felt exotic to me, but to her, it was far-away Atlanta that was exotic.

Now that I've lived in Singapore for eight years and travelled all over Asia, I'm not sure what is exotic anymore, but I think that even Atlanta would qualify for me now.