"The first condition of understanding a foreign country is to smell it." - Rudyard Kipling

I agree that to truly understand a place, you need to visit it. I feel lucky to have been to 16 countries: Canada, the U.S., Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, China (including TIBET, which should be an independent country), Hong Kong (before it was returned to China),India, Nepal, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, Thailand, Burma (which I refuse to call Myanmar because the military dictatorship gave it that name), Laos and Cambodia.