This in particular:
Quote Originally Posted by Ray View Post
I assure you that living a few years in the Orient alone, does not make one an expert. You can never understand it all unless it is in your system, and better still in your genes!
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I find it humorous when foreigners to the Orient assume they represent the Oriental mindset because they have touched the shore of the Orient and hobnobbed with the savages for a short while!
Having spent time in several Oriental nations, hobnobbing with the great unwashed as opposed to the chatterati and the cocktail crowd and having explored places where most westerners did not go, I realize how little I or any westerner will know or understand. I learned just enough to continually warn others here and elsewhere, with reference to something transpiring in East Asia, South Asia or the Middle East (three quite different places...), they are "thinking in western terms, bad mistake."

Also learned that in the orient, very little is as it seems.

Interestingly, much the same can be said of the U.S. We are basically of the European hearth in many respects -- but we are emphatically not Europeans...

Here too, much is often not what it seems...