Cultural experience

Are your plans for exotic adventures abroad in ruins? Don’t you dare get on a plane? Won’t the country let you out or in? I once found a bizarre exotic adventure nearby.

The world is a wonderful place! When you travel around with an open mind, how can you not be gobsmacked by all the spectacular sights and weird stuff everywhere?

After years of living as an expat in the US, I still have trouble subduing my inner Dutch girl with her opinions and judgments and directness. So if you’re an American, you’ll want to stop reading, because here’s my list of 7 American things I don’t do . . .

I had planned to eat mopane worms tonight, but instead I’m facing a hamburger and fries. I am not amused. Having traveled thousands of miles across the African continent I have arrived in a country with the exotic and lyrical name of Zimbabwe, land of the fabled Shona chiefs. And now see me sit here in a restaurant called the Silver Spur.

“I want to go abroad,” I told my husband one steamy tropical day after we’d been living in Ghana, West Africa for what seemed like ages and I was beginning…