You learn a lot while living in another culture, even one that's relatively close to yours. And one of the most striking things I've recently learned, is how little I actually know about other cultures.
Estonias, me included, go out proclaiming loud that we know so much more about what is going on in the rest of the world than people in some other countries, especially in the US, do. Well, I have to admit, I know quite a bunch about Europe, about the US and other western countries .... but I actually know very little about Asia, Africa, Australia and Southern America. They are just sooooooooo far from our little tiny country, and our limited capacities just do not seem to reach that far. Of course we have our own experts and so on, but on the general basis, these regions do not seem to be much of our interest.
And this is sad. Because this is the point where I have to admit how narrow my world really is. Its as though because we are small in terms of country size we have just adopted the western world and then maybe Russia to work as our horizon of knowledge, and we are just as ignorant about what the life is really like in other cultures as the average American can be about the rest of the world.
On the bright side, though, this only means that there's tons of more interesting worlds to discover :)
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