In her book Touch the Dragon : A Thai Journal, Karen Connelly describes in detail a trip to Thailand she does from August 1986 to August 1987 at the age of seventeen. Of course, when she arrives in this foreign country, she does not like it at all, mostly because of how things such as the language and the food are so different from what she is used to. Thai spirituality is also dissimular from hers. As much as she considers herself as an outsider at the start, throughout the journal, she learns to accept these aspects of her new life, and in the end, she does not want to go home because she literally falls in love with Thailand.

Firstly, when we travel, one of the main things that is normally different is the language spoken. In this case, Karen Connelly does not speak a word of Thai, and is...