honestly it’s good to have these conversations. your perceptions of eachothers comeups are heavily influenced by propaganda. your new friend has it in his head that we all have luxury underwear. this is not an accident. one of the things i’ve been bonding with my foreign coworker over is she’s been realizing my rural american upbringing matches her own experiences in a lot of ways she didn’t anticipate because the media about what america is like that reached her focused on specific urban and suburban experiences that aren’t… real. that’s the thing with sitcoms and dramas that we export. they influence perceptions of how we live abroad and that can influence people to see here as something it isn’t. having these talks help build international solidarity