I had my first Twinterview the other day.

Angelo Fernando of Hoi Polloi interviewed me and Yang-May on Twitter about the book.

What an interesting experience…. You feel suspended in cyberspace. You know there are people out there following you… but all you can see are your interviewer’s Tweets.

The fact that you have to limit your answers to 140 characters is a great discipline. It helps to organise your thoughts.

I have been converted…. I believe Twinterviews are great training for podcast and video interviews. Think of a 140-character answer first and then elaborate on that.

The toughest question, as ever, was about the reasons that lead me to write the book: “Was there a book inside your head?”

In order to answer that, you need to put your life in perspective.

Luckily, I am reading a book that has helped me to do just that.

If you began your career in journalism, you have to read Oracle Bones by Peter Hessler.

It’s a wonderful example of how journalism and writing helps you to understand complex realities and relate to people in cultures so different from your own.

It was a sentence in the book that brought it all home to me. Hessler describes his years in Beijing like a “floating life in a floating city”.

When I lived in Prague in the early 1990s, I often had the feeling of floating…. Oracle Bones made me realise that I wasn’t  lost… Prague was floating towards a new future and was taking me along. While doing this, it was also writing my future book in my head.

Never underestimate the power of floating…

“China knocks the ego out of you.”

I love this quote by Christine Lu.

Her talk last week was very inspiring. Christine is not only the founder of The China Business Show. She is also involved in a number of exciting internet ventures in China.

Recently she took a group of venture capitalists and internet entrepreneurs from Silicon Valley to China to meet their local counterparts. She named the tour Geeks on a Plane.

Although she worked in Shanghai and has travelled many times to China, Christine  doesn’t want to be called a “China expert”.

She believes that “the more you deal with China, the humbler you become”. She says that the longer you stay in China, the more you begin to recognise just how huge and diverse the country is.

Christine gets a charge out of those people who spend a couple of years in the country and call themselves China experts. She calls it the “Marco Polo complex”.

I can certainly relate to this phenomenon from my days in Eastern Europe. And something else Christine mentioned made me laugh and took me back to my first months in Prague. She said that she doesn’t do second-tier cities in China because she doesn’t “thrive by carrying around her own toilet paper”.

There was a time in the autumn of 1990, when shops in Prague were out of toilet paper. So… (and here I have a confession to make…) we would go to international hotels…and stock up on toilet paper!

Amazing …  how adventures seem to be about the smallest things!

I came across a quote by former East German dissident Rudolf Bahro the other day that made me think.

“When the forms of an old culture are dying, the new culture is created by those people who are not afraid to be insecure”.

If you follow the pace of the interactive web and the way in which it is connecting people around the world, you are left with little doubt that we are currently experiencing a major acceleration.

The old forms of relating to other cultures are dying.

Sharing interests on social networking platforms creates new forms of bonding. We begin to relate to people from different ethnic and religious backgrounds in a new way.

They are much closer to us. Somehow our passion for new connections makes us forget the fear.

When you move out of your culture and venture into a new one, insecurity becomes a constant travel companion.

It is there every time you realise that people around you share traditions you are not part of or memories from a school system you are unable to relate to.

What do you do?

You dwell in the experience and let insecurity become a key for exploring that particular culture.

The lessons you learn are unique. I promise.

Don’t get me wrong. I am not writing this because I think I am special.

It is just an obsession of mine. I want to find out what living abroad for the past 26 years has done to my brain.

Apparently, I am more likely than other people to be able to use a box of tacks as a candle holder.

According to studies conducted by William Maddux, Assistant Professor of Organisational Behaviour at INSEAD and Adam Galinsky, Professor of Ethics and Management at the Kellogg School, living abroad and creativity are tightly connected.

MBA students at the Kellogg School were asked to solve the famous Duncker candle problem. Results showed that the longer students had spent living abroad the more likely they were to find a creative solution.

The university also ran a second test on them involving the mock sale of a gas station. Again, those students who had lived abroad were more likely to reach a deal that demanded a creative approach.

Vacations don’t count. Only living abroad leads to creativity.

Maddux and Galinsky found out that the more students had adapted to foreign cultures when they lived abroad, the more creative they turned out to be.

So, you see, it is worth enduring being called a foreigner a million times or having to eat the worst food ever (this was in Eastern Europe a long time ago).

Pay-back time eventually comes.

Tacks and candles are high on my shopping list for the weekend.

I almost forgot…but it has really been 25 years.

I was negotiating Blackfriars bridge on my high hills last night on the way to a function when it dawned on me… I have been living abroad for a quarter of a century.

On September 19th, 1983, my father packed his old Citroën with my boxes and drove me to Austria where I was to begin my studies at the University of Innsbruck.

I remember falling asleep immediately after we left the house and waking up when we were already deep into the Alps.

That’s when I realised that I was living home and my old life for good.

The thought didn’t frighten me. I felt the mountains embracing me and lifting me up. I knew they would be looking after me.

Innsbruck is so beautiful in the spring.

A fellow student from Nigeria used to say that when you walk by the river Inn, the beauty of the mountains overwhelms you and you feel your heart bursting.

It is pictures like this that were going through my mind last night on Blackfriars bridge.

An overwhelming collection of faces, words, sunsets, snowfall, books, planes, hugs, etc. that have made up the past 25 years. They have all morphed into a body of memories and ultimately into who I am today.

The interesting thing is that even the less happy memories (like all the times I have been called a foreigner….) have been swallowed by that body and transformed into something I would have never wanted to miss.

And guess what… the sun is shining today in London, same as that day in the Alps.

I know people in Italy who use their neighborhood cafe as their “˜home away from home”. It’s the place where they go to meet their friends and boast about their latest love affair. It gives them a sense of belonging.

˜My home away from home” is my Greek greengrocer, down the street from where I live, in West London. It is a mixture of greengrocer and deli with great Middle Eastern food: halva, hummus, all kinds of olives, pita bread, great pickles. But it is much more than that. The owners, two Cypriot brothers, play Gregorian chants in the store and hold interesting conversations with their customers, about different things, the meaning of life or the best room in your house for writing a book.

“So where are you from in Italy?”

I told them I was from Verona, in the north of Italy, between Milan and Venice.

“We are from the South, from Cyprus.”

May be because I am not very fond of the usual north-south debate with all its stereotypes or may be out of Mediterranean solidarity, I told them that my great-grandfather came from Naples. That’s how we came to speak about Sicily. Sicily has wonderful food and very good looking people, I said picking up an apple and putting it into a paper bag. “Of course”, said the younger brother, they are all Greek! After this lesson in Mediterranean anthropology, I got another one one day I was shopping for fruit. I was inspecting my favorite type of grapes, when the younger brother came over with a bag full of dried plums.

I threw him a puzzled look. “This is what people in Italy eat when they have constipation.  I am afraid it would make me spend the rest of the week in the loo!”

My Greek friend frowned. Don’t you know that the best works of mathematics, physics and religion have been written in bathrooms. No, I did not know that but it made sense to me, so why argue.

The Greek brothers employ a young French help of Moroccan descent with one of those beautiful Berber names that makes you dream of the Atlas Mountains and their oasis. We often talk about the house he built in Fez and the great food you can eat there. Across the street from my greengrocer is a beauty parlor with my Sicilian hairdresser (yes, he is good looking and ….no, he does not look Greek), my Armenian-Iranian beautician and her colleague from Ghana. I often speak wit
h the two ladies about my grandmother, who will turn 100 this summer. The lady from Ghana told me a wonderful story about hers. According to the local tradition, she had some beads she was going to be buried with, but because she loved her granddaughter such much, she decided to give them to her. Now, that her grandma has passed away, she still has the beads. I could picture the beads in my mind and, in an instant, they turned into magical prayer beads to hold in your hand every time you wanted to tell your late grandmother how much you loved her.

In a pre-Borat era, I traveled to Kazakhstan to write about the privatization of copper mines (sorry Borat, no potassium) for the now defunct newspaper The European.

I boarded an old Soviet plane at Frankfurt airport. Its huge belly opened up and swallowed its passengers, including me the only Westerner. I sat on my rickety seat and watched in a trance-like state the great expanse of Russia mutate into Central Asia, while tea was being served out of a colorful tin pot.

I arrived in Alma Ata in the middle of the night. With nobody in sight at passport control, I was already contemplating the prospect of having to turn my bags into a make-shift bed and spending the night in a corner of the arrivals hall.

While those scary thoughts were going through my mind, a Central Asian smile materialized out of the blue, sat down behind the counter and beamed at me.

The round smile went through the pages of my Italian passport and began to chant the usual questions. All of the sudden he paused (see, Borat, in Kazakhstan they do know what a pause ¦). What is your favorite sport? “Do you like football?”

I happen to highly dislike football, but, for a number of reasons, I did not think that would have been a wise answer to give at that stage. While I was scanning my brain for something polite to say, my smiling Kazakh friend continued his line of questioning. I love the Verona team. They have been doing very well this year. “Do you think they will be able to keep it up?”

I could not believe my ears. Verona is the town in Italy where I grew up (and which shows up in my passport as my place of birth), but having left a long time ago and not liking football, I did not have a clue about the glories of my fellow Veronese.

Honestly, this was the last thing I expected to hear after landing in the middle of Central Asia. But my friend did not seem to mind if I looked puzzled. The fact that I came from a place that had such a great football team seemed to have put him in an even better mood and to have created a bond between us.

His smile got bigger and filled the entire bottom part of his round Central Asian face. He proceeded to merrily stamp my passport and wish me a great time in Kazakhstan.

In the years to come, I would often think of this odd encounter, every time I had to come up with a strategy for bonding with somebody from a culture I knew very little about. This man’s passion was football and that built some kind of a bridge between us. I am on the lookout for other bridges.