Sam Anderson writes in the New York Times Magazine, Sunday, March 24, 2019:
As the English writer G.K. Chesterton once put it, in a quote I found printed in my corny old travel journal: “The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one’s own country as a foreign land.” After looking at a Roman stone wall topped by a Saxon stone wall topped by a medieval English wall next to a modern paved street, I began to see what a thin crust of national history the United States actually stands on. I began to realize how silly and narrow our notion of exceptionalism is — this impulse to consider ourselves somehow immune to the forces that shape the rest of the world. The environment I grew up in, with its malls and freeways, its fantasies of heroic individualism, began to seem unnatural. I started to sense how much reality exists elsewhere in the world — not just in a theoretical sense, in books and movies, but with the full urgent weight of the real. And not just in Europe but on every other continent, all the time, forever. I began to realize how much I still had to learn before I could pretend to understand anything.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/03/20/magazine/rick-steves-travel-world.html