I caught myself staring outside the bus, at the tall buildings lining the highway from Kuala Lumpur to Penang, and I thought the idea of being in a strange country, or strange city or town or whatever territory that is not what you're used to -- it felt like coming inside someone's house, uninvited, and you watch the people who live there with so much curiosity, and perhaps romanticization. You watch them and their home detachedly, like it is the nicest thing ever -- do you know how Americans (or Touristy White People In General) would go to a poor country (Manila) and say, look at them, so happy in the midst of poverty? It felt like that, except I don't mean it in the sense that I glorify poverty or suffering, but in the sense that there is something charming in the (artificially) unfamiliar, the undiscovered, the unknown.
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