Once you’ve lived abroad for long enough, you stop noticing the little differences between your home and adopted cultures. Then one day an old friend arrives at the Frankfurt Airport, and you’re back looking at your adopted home through a newcomer’s eyes, through the eyes of the visitor who hasn’t spent the last four years living and breathing German culture.

You stretch and strain, trying to remember how it felt to be new here, to see through a lens of excitement (at all you find exotic), shock (at all that you find strange), and euphoria (at all you find even better than what you are used to at home).