It's not that I didn't see the 200 pound body draped across the living room coffee table. It's just that I didn't notice it.

Once you've lived abroad for a certain length of time, having enjoyed the first blissful honeymoon year, managed the second year of complete denial, survived the third of suicidal depression and fourth of eventual resignation (or, as overpaid Human Resource counselors like to put it, "acclimation") you really do go blind.

Discovering that people regularly cook on wood stoves doubling as furnaces doesn't require copious descriptive emails home anymore. Gold-toothed hairdressers, nicely made-up and coiffed, are frequented without quandary. Horse-drawn wagons, piled high with sugar beets or coal (depending on the season) are not even admired as you pass them by in your car. Impoverished peasant women washing tattered laundry in meandering creeks, dairy cows drinking placidly upstream, are not worthy of comment.

'Next week' is almost the same as 'next month', and that lag doesn't drive you insane anymore. Time has changed (or perhaps its changed you), but life slows down outside of America. Life itself becomes bigger: poverty is your child's playmate whose only balanced meals are at your house. Outrage is your friend, an unemployed single mother, whose only means of feeding her children, the monthly social assistance payment, is cancelled in the name of economic austerity. Injustice is the small town journalist thrown into jail for exposing corruption in low-level government.

Instead of lining up at Marineland to kiss whales or dropping a grand at Disney World, you tour nearby Warsaw, tracing WWII bullet holes with your fingers, visiting a former Gestapo prison and staring at a statue of soldiers emerging from the sewers immortalizing their failed heroic bid to escape the Nazi terror. You begin to understand the term "mass destruction" as you envision 85% of the bustling, crowded city completely demolished by the Germans, and as you visit any of the several concentration camps where children under the age of 14 are not allowed to see the film footage.

Perspective is everything, and suddenly that dead pig in the living room, although perhaps not your choice of centerpiece, is understood to be a temporary aberration on its way to the kitchen where it will become the mainstay of one family's winter survival. Nothing more, nothing less.