Excellent article. Crap. Is. Critical. When Mike, Eric, Jeremy and I moved to Berlin we literally brought just a handful of pens, pencils and sketchbooks. The goal being - in essence - to "bleed on the typewriter." There was an inside joke that hither yon would say "yes" to everything. (I mean, our first gig was as extras in a bizarre contemporary dance performance, yikes.) Every project whisper, rumor or design competition we could get our hands on helped us build a better sense of the foreign place we sought to discover. As a collective, we tried our best to live by that philosophy, believing fiercely that volume would enable us to discover better.
I honestly haven't felt that same level of foreign excitement / anxiety until I stumbled into Steemit last July. It has been like discovering "Berlin" all over again. Anyway, looking forward to more of your writing. 2017 will be a monumentally crappy year in the most fantastic way possible.