I’m a big fan of cross-cultural mashups, probably because I view myself as sort of third culture kid lite. If you’re not familiar with the TCK term, in my mind it describes people like my husband, who have one foot in Culture A and one in Culture B, and somehow mix them together into something new and wonderful. He physically moved from one cultural context to another when his family left what was then the Soviet Union. I had a different type of cross-cultural exchange, spending a year in Finland at age 16, and then a college semester in Russia as part of my nine (yes, *nine*) years of Russian language study. One of my early techniques for language learning was listening to tapes of Russian pop music, but I was introduced to “world music” very early on. Read More →