If you understand this about me

It is one of the small pleasures of living in a developing part of the world that the foreigners one meets tend to live life in a vivid and eccentric sort of way, and when you listen to their tales of high adventure in the African jungle, you find that you are subsequently ruined from a conversational point of view, that you can no longer even pretend to be remotely interested in someone's trip to the mall, or their thoughts about the stock market, or their opinions about the relative merit of a basketball player, and soon you will be branded as aloof, simply because once, in a faraway land, you heard some good stories.