Wandering Star

Perhaps it's an obvious move at this point, but I've finally gotten around to reading some Paul Bowles. (Feed the words American+Morocco+Literature into a search engine and his name is likely to be the first thing that pops up.) This passage from the first few pages of The Sheltering Sky seems particularly apt at the moment:

He did not think of himself as a tourist; he was a traveler. The difference is partly one of time, he would explain. Whereas the tourist generally hurries back home at the end of a few weeks or months, the traveler, belonging no more to one place than the next, moves slowly, over periods of years, from one part of the earth to another. Indeed, he would have found it difficult to tell, among the many places he had lived, precisely where it was he had felt most at home.

...another important difference between tourist and traveler is the former accepts his own civilization without question; not so the traveler, who compares it with the others, and rejects those elements he finds not to his liking.