Spent today in a workshop on cultural awareness.

Having had the privilege of travelling fairly widely I was curious to see what I could learn that might have helped. Not that I get to travel so much these days. I was somewhat surprised to find that I was still the most travelled and the most language articulate. [1]

But it wasn't so much about other cultures as getting us to look at our national "culture" for want of a better word. Especially its idiosyncracies.

And getting us to look at ourselves as alien, will hopefully make us better able to help international students struggling to be strangers in a strange land.

Useful.

[1] Not that I claim fluency in anything (including English on a bad day) but I scored well for smatterings of all sorts. Hausa, Finnish, bits of written Chinese. The more esoteric the better in my book.