Professional expatriates live like that. Real travelers are vulnerable creatures, at once attracted and repelled by the cultures they move among, but expatriates are hard to reach, hard to impress; they carry about with them the plastic bubble of their own culture, and nothing touches them until it has been filtered through the protective membrane of prejudice, the life-support system that forms their invisible excess baggage when they move on, from one contract to the next, to another country and another set of complaints.

Hilary Mantel, A Memoir of My Former Self-…, loc. 67