This Benedict Evans tweet came across my Twitter stream earlier: “New to the country, I am still at the stage where everything I see has a value precisely because I don’t know what value to give it.”

It’s a perfect way to think about experiencing any new place. Familiarity gives rise to complacency, and characteristics to place that might be genuinely remarkable become literally the opposite: unremarkable and unremarked upon aspects of the character of a place.

In considering what this looks like in my own daily life, it’s a reminder of the value of getting away from the normal and into the new—of experiencing new places, new adventures, new friendships—so that on returning to a familiar place it can be unfamiliar again, for a time.