Intercultural Press has agreed to publish my next book, which will be short, easy guide to understanding deep culture and getting the most out of our intercultural experiences. Here's an excerpt from chapter one:

A friend recently returned from Nepal complaining about "too many tourists in Kathmandu"; mass tourism, "Coca Cola in the Himalayas", and pre-packaged "adventure" tours. He concluded sadly that globalization is making travel so easy that there's "no place left to explore".

His feelings are understandable. We live in a global age. Many of us feel too connected to the rest of the world and travel to get away from things. We want adventure and it's easy to think that the further we go from home, the deeper, more exciting and authentic our experience will be.

But of course it's not that easy.

In his rush towards the exotic, my friend is forgetting that how we travel is at least as important as the particular destination we choose. Adventure depends on the state of mind we take with us, and how we deal with challenges we find. Even in our shrinking world--particularly in our shrinking world--travel can teach us wonders if we ask deeper questions about our destinations and about the perceptual baggage that we bring from home.

So I propose a deep culture journey.

A deep culture journey is one whose goal is learning about the self through learning about others. It involves an attempt to understand the everyday life in new places as seen from the point of view of our hosts. We learn not from going further but from looking more carefully. By setting aside judgments, by engaging more fully with the people we meet, and by looking beneath the surface of our experiences, we enter into new cultural worlds.

Sick in Paris

Spent Christmas in Alsace. Alsace is in Eastern France, near the German border, so the Christmas tradition is deep. When I was a child, Christmas in San Diego meant a plastic Christmas tree which we put together by sticking the branches into the pre-drilled holes in the trunk. Sometimes, we would spray the plastic branches with fake "snow" from a can - this was, after all, California. In Alsace, there is lots of fog and freezing temperatures, which means that there was heavy frost on the trees - as though the canned snow of my childhood had turned real - like Pinocchio turning into a real boy. Walking through the forests on the hill near Estelle's home town was magical.

The bad new: Back in Paris, the following day, Estelle started to feel sick. We were on our way to have dinner with a Japanese couple I had met on the flight from Tokyo. By the time we made it to the restaurant Estelle was extremely nauseous. She took a taxi back to the apartment while I stayed for dinner. Back home that evening, I learned that the foie gras we ate at Christmas dinner had been from a contaminated batch. We got the word from Estelle's parents who had verified the serial number on the package they dug out of the trash can.