They say that travel expands the mind, but in the few short weeks I spent in England, Ireland and the Netherlands this summer, I found just the opposite to be true.
You grow up believing in some kind of other, that people from other parts of the world are so much different than yourself.
But really, there is no other. At least in all the most important ways, people are all the same - only the food and money changes.
The college-age guys who I met putting back pints in the pubs of London had the same interests as my friends back home.
Drinking, chasing women and, most importantly, sports were all high on the priority list.
It's hard to describe the passion English fans have for soccer, but it's somewhere in the neighborhood of Southeastern Conference football, only slightly more violent.
I quickly found that if you're willing to talk soccer (even if you're an ignorant American), people had plenty to say.
The conversations were strangely familiar.
Seemingly every team in the English Premier League was run by an incompetent manager doing his best to run a beloved club into the ground.
There were plenty of overpaid players who hadn't done one thing to live up to the ridiculous amount of money they were making.
I learned that Arsenal fans think that Chelsea supporters are nothing more than rich West Londoners who know how to jump out of their Bentleys and onto a good bandwagon when they see one.
Conversely, it seems that the fine people of Kensington (the area of London where Chelsea FC resides) wouldn't be caught dead slumming it over in Highbury with the Arsenal riffraff.
Soccer was a sport I was familiar with. One I really like. Cricket, on the other hand, was a mystery to me.
I happened to be in England while the country was playing host to the Cricket World Cup.
If you don't know, cricket matches can last quite a while - days, even.
This meant by the time my friends and I had made our way home from the pubs (which, strangely enough, close at 11 p.m.), there was enough time to catch an hour or so of cricket.
I spent hours watching the sport during a two-week period. I still have no idea how you win a cricket match. But I did find it to be entertaining.
Cricket is a lot more like baseball than most people think, and the guys who play it are incredibly athletic.
I doubt cricket sweeps America any time soon, but if you're surfing the high channels of your satellite TV one day and come across an India and West Indies test match, stop in and check it out for a few minutes.
While cricket was a pleasant surprise, rugby was a bit more like I expected it to be.
The England Lions Tour to South Africa was in full swing by the time I touched down at Heathrow Airport, and people packed the bars to watch.
Aside from the ultra-tight short-shorts and occasional eye gouging, it was pretty enjoyable to watch - a lot like American football.
For whatever reason, I just couldn't get into rugby, though. I guess it just wasn't different enough.
To me, it lacked the passion of soccer and didn't really deliver the novelty of cricket.
If there is one lesson I'll take with me from my trip overseas, it's that sports can be a great vehicle through which to see the world.
Sports can teach you about people and a culture in ways that taking a tour or seeing sights never could.
When you take time to discover what people are passionate about, you see who they really are.
The Florida football fan with a painted chest and a flag he's wearing as a cape and the Stoke City soccer fan with a scarf around his neck have a lot more in common than either of them might think.
If you ever get the chance to go somewhere new, take it.
You don't have to cross the ocean to see something you never have before.
Take a road trip to some away football games this year. Baton Rouge might be just as foreign to you as London.
Or hey, if you're really adventurous, there's always Starkville, Miss.
