When we travel we notice the small things that we take for granted in our own country: the way that everyday Japanese life is ferociously aesthetic, or the knowing way that people look at each other in a French café, even the subtle intonations of an unknown language. This may lead us, in turn, to reshape our causal maps of our own culture and country—our own desires and actions—and this new knowledge lets us imagine new ways that we could live ourselves, with Japanese baths or Italian passion or French wit. The cliché says that travel broadens the mind, but this may be literally true. When we
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