Over the holidays, I had the great fortune of being able to visit with one of our longtime family friends, much like any other home for the holidays college student would do. What differentiates me, though, is that this family friend was British. Born and raised in the UK with an accent to boot, this visit was more than just visiting with a friend but was a cultural eye-opener. Honestly, I think it was the same for him as he finds our Americanness as equally fascinating as we find his Britishness.

The cultural differences go beyond interchangeable vocabulary and cool words like “rubbish,” “dodgy,” and “bloke.” While our family friend was in town, we went to a local university hockey game, and he walked away absolutely stunned at our enjoyment of violence and the extreme fanfare around a university match. Going back to the last time he visited us, my high school graduation, he was equally stunned with our large family gathering and twenty person table out on the back porch. It was actually a little amusing when he kept making comments about how things like this just don’t happen in the U.K. Similarly, his tales of his uni days and life in London are similarly interesting in their foreign-ness.

This leaves me with the wonder about why these two so similar countries are really rather ignorant of the other. Why do we know so little about a country that we were once a part of, and are still rather close to economically? Without Britain, America wouldn’t even exist in the manner that it does today, and there is no other country with whom we are so similar. Why are we so ignorant of the other? And better yet, why are we so ignorant of the rest of the world around us?

The borders of America can seem as if they never end, as we travel from New York to California and still never leave American soil. The same distance would have one all the way across a continent anywhere else. The majority of Americans rarely travel within America, let alone explore the rest of the world. Our education system focuses heavily on American history, while courses like World and European history are often optional. It would be entirely possible to live one’s entire life without a real acknowledgment of the vast amounts of peoples and lands beyond American borders. Consider this a call to action, a call to travel, and a call to explore, because there is so much to see and learn outside of the borders we call home.