Often I don't like to be in contact with things in the country I live. I don't want to see them, hear them, or meet them. Whenever I'm in contact with them, they remind me of how people around me are judging me, and how the culture I'm surrounded by says I'm not good enough.
I think this has to do with how we perceive people around us. When we see foreigners on the street, we usually see them as tourists at first thought, and we naturally assume they're different. We even welcome them to visit our cities, we treat them as guests, and we tolerate their mistakes. But when we see local people like us on the street, we try to frame them with the common sense of our own culture, which we think we understand. We think the people we see should follow the rules and the customs of the culture, and we start to judge them: Are they rich or poor? Do they have respectable, stable jobs? Are they rushing to work? Why do they seem to be having fun while it's not yet weekend? We can't help but start to inspect if the people match the standard of our culture.
I live in Taiwan. So I don't like to listen to Mandarin songs, I don't like to watch TV speaking Chinese, and I don't like to see the hustle in factories and shops who seem to be extracting their last pennies of profit every day. They warp my imagination of how my life can be in the globalized world, they limit how I can think, they want me to be the same, and to be measured by the same standard as they're measured against.
I can't afford to be a real foreigner in other countries financially yet. But as the first step I find it's more encouraging to be on the internet, where I can listen to foreign music, read blogs by foreigners in different cultures, and jump into foreign places with Google Maps. On the internet, I feel I'm always a foreign tourist, being welcomed, being treated with more tolerance, and being encouraged to explore anything that interests me during the trip.