A few nights a week I hear them below my balcony in the streets, banging drums and chanting. I look down and see the red flags hoisted, the white crescent and star of the Turkish Republic flapping, the men bundled in trench coats and muddy boots, their hot breath visible in the air, the women wrapped in bright hijabs, some of the only color in a month of overcast skies and endless rain.

Their shouts and protest banners change but the anger and the desperation does not. Last week the focus was the ruling party’s arrest of high-ranking military officials accused of planning a coup. This week they’ve assumed a more anti-American flavor, protesting the U.S. congressional panel’s resolution to brand the mass killings of Armenians by the Ottoman Empire as “genocide.”

Regardless of what they protest I always feel an urge to join them, to be swept long into something collective, enormous and transforming. But the seldom agreeable motive of the march, and the tendency for these gatherings to burst into violence, often keep me away.

That’s what studying abroad, and travel generally, is about: allowing yourself to be transformed, allowing all the layers of your ignorance to peel away after being burned by the experience of larger things.

Days ago on the other side of Turkey a 6.0 magnitude earthquake swallowed a number of rural villages. A few thousand mud-brick homes crumbled into rubble and the tall, beautiful minarets of the mosques toppled to the ground like pencils.

The dead were almost immediately forgotten, as such horror often unearths greater worry, such as: what if, by chance, this was to happen in a place where significantly more people live, such as Istanbul? The event is commoditized, stripped of all blood and emotion, becomes a brick on which Turkish politicians build a campaign. The tragedy disappears into the hearts of those who suffered it.

I was more than 1,000 kilometers away at the time of the quake, traveling in Cappadocia, 50 yards beneath the Earth in an underground city built by the Hittites 4,000 years ago, where persecuted Christians later hid to evade the empires, first Roman and then Arab, whose armies rode back and forth across the plains above. This land has a history on which my country would be a blip, a freckle on the thigh. It has seen empires come and empires go, revolutions and counterrevolutions. The shepherds I see strolling along the hillsides, like the hills of yellow, swaying grass themselves, seem untouched by these waves of differing governments and ideologies. They live meekly, with their flock and their staff, much as they did 1,000, even 5,000 years ago.

Ninety five percent of the people I encounter have never heard of Oklahoma. The other five percent include American exchange students who have perhaps watched clips of our ignorant and embarrassing senators on television, or who know of the Murrow bombing, the musical, or the dust-bowl backdrop of Steinbeck’s “Grapes of Wrath.” I’ve grown accustomed to this and have often found the best way to impress people is to mention Brad Pitt was born there.

I play upon ignorance. I note Oklahoma has the largest American Indian population in the States — something, anything to make my birthplace seem somehow exotic. I do not mention the unchanging landscape of Wal-Marts and Best Buys and fast food chains bordering the enormous, fast-moving freeways, traveling through which seems like being spun around in a barber’s chair, seeing the same vision over and over again. When people talk about our culture they refer to things that are no longer present in our reality: cowboys, buffalo, the wild west. But whenever I take my eyes from my computer and look, really look, all I see are Wal-Marts and Best Buys and fast food chains. What does that mean?

When I talk about Oklahoma I talk about how strong the wind is, the flat horizon, the ice storms and how students at universities such as OU have come to worship college football players, and therefore future car salesmen and burger joint proprietors.

Stories about tornadoes impress people the most, or perhaps descriptions of the religious landscape, where every white person is assumed to be some manner of Christian and the student newspaper opinion column at the leading university constantly publishes articles by students shouting arguments that God does not exist simply to make themselves feel they’ve transgressed. I talk about church camps, the songs sung and the Bible exercises and the demented people to whom parents entrust their children simply because they claim to love Jesus, whom they know nothing about.

Such stories send forth a thrill of exotic strangeness, about a land others do not understand, a war-loving society, a land where people embalm their recently deceased relatives and stare at them for days before lowering them into the ground. I’ve lived in Oklahoma most of my life, I tell them. I’m not lying. I’ve seen it. I know.

I talk about these things as a means of discovery. I reach inside myself for things that have been inside me for so long that they have become invisible. I hold them out in front of me for others to pick apart. I become alienated from them again. I find they no longer fit inside me.

This is the great wealth of traveling, and I encourage all students at OU to consider seriously the option to study abroad. Allow the pre-conceived strangeness of foreignness, constructed by your culture, to evaporate in its simplicity. Allow light to be thrown into the corners of yourself that you have yet to discover, much less explore. Learn to fully understand and love the place you are from. Take a trip, study elsewhere (the more exotic the better) and begin to perceive not so much the overwhelming strangeness of others, but of yourself.

David Joshua Jennings is a English and philosophy senior currently studying abroad in Istanbul, Turkey.