I've travelled to a few countries, but all of them were Western until I had the occasion to travel to Japan, which was by far my best vacation ever. There were many sources to my pleasure there, but the main one was that I have a strong interest in analysing people and their behaviour, and Japan is absolutely different from what I would have expected. I was even told many things about it before, but it is truly a fascinating place to be in.

First of all, everything was absolutely clean on the streets. There was not one cigar, one little piece of plastic. I don't know how they manage it. I think that I saw one piece of garbage and it was a little bag that had flown off a cliff near a cave, where it was really hard go to pick it up. I imagine that if it had not been so hard to reach, it would have been picked up already by the time I passed by.

While on there, I talked to quite a few tourists and many had only explored the main touristic parts and been to places filled with other tourists. They were sightseeing, and that's ok, but they didn't have the chance to really see the Japanese in their "natural habitat". I went to farms, to middle-class apartments, to a fisher's home and followed a tourist guide in Hiroshima who described their view on the terrible events that ended World War II. I was amazed that they were not resentful at all but felt guilty of their participation in the war and felt that it was some kind of rightly but disastrous punishment.

On my way back, I felt that I still had so much to explore, and ever since then, every vacation I've taken hasn't been to "exotic places" to see beaches or buildings but to reach into communities and examine them thoroughly. What I love about it is that it creates the greatest separation from the zone of comfort where we are accustomed to be and pops the bubble of our familiarity. We cannot become one with this new environment at once, and this feeling of our minds trying to adapt is just wonderful.