Exploring Cultures: A Traveler's Guide to Figuring Out the Natives

Exploring Cultures, approximately 44 pages, intends to help you broaden your travel horizons by showing you how to discover and understand the customs and ways of people in another culture.

If your foreign travels take you only to museums filled with art and artifacts, only to scenic wonders, only to historical sites, you are not getting to know the places you visit. Such travels give you just a glimpse of what life is like in a particular country.

But you don’t have to travel in such a lifeless manner. You can add immeasurably to the richness and quality of your travels by inserting into them a human element, by getting a solid feel for the day-to-day life of the ordinary people who make up a country.

Culture is the key to getting that solid feel for a people’s daily life. Culture focuses not on isolated individuals and whatever personal characteristics they may possess, but on societies and the beliefs and ways of behaving that its members hold in common.

Every culture has its own customs and ways. Regardless of their approach to life, however, you’ll find that people in other cultures are not all that different from you. We all share the same basic wants, needs and desires.