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Awareness is the one trait that you will develop living abroad. There are other ways to develop awareness. You can read about the world and it's different cultures, but when you go and actually experience it you really become aware. You will become more aware of yourself and where you come from and your own culture.

Things will be different living abroad. On so many levels things will be different. TheĀ culture will be different which is huge and affects so many things. The food will be different. The people, their mannerisms, the language and their beliefs will be different.

And it's these differences that make you more aware

After coming back to the States after I had lived abroad I realized some people live in such a small bubble. Perhaps we all live in bubbles. But our bubbles become larger when we get to experience something new. Most people will not live abroad or ever have an experience like that.

We cannot know everything. Can we be aware of everything? I don't think so. I was watching a Youtube video and this woman said that she thought there were two kinds of people in the world: local people and people who are interested in foreign things. It's the local people that live in smaller bubbles. But when you stretch your boundaries and have an experience like living abroad you become bigger.

Living abroad exposes you to so many new things that it tests your assumptions about what is right. Is there a right way? You realize there are different ways of doing things, different ways of responding, different ways of being and you find out more about what it's like to be a human. And on some levels we are not all that different.