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There she was, a Japanese woman standing below my window, calling up to me in English. It would have been terribly romantic if I hadn't been sitting on a bus in India.

The bus was parked in some anonymous, open-sewered settlement that reeked of authenticity. Chika was 34 then, six years older than me, with pajama-style Indian clothes billowing to her hiking boots, black hair sailing around her shoulders, and a backpack bigger than a Tokyo apartment. She seemed to have woken up on the wrong side of the world. "Scuse me! You know bus to Pushkar?" she pleaded. And suddenly I had a shadow with dimples, obsessed, it turned out, with television's Little House on the Prairie.

"I am not normal Japanese," Chika said. Unmarried and a student of New Age health care, she felt like an odd duck in the fishbowl of Japanese society, and so she'd flown away to lose herself in mankind. And few places have more of that than India. She had but one goal: to meet the Dalai Lama at his government-in-exile in Dharamsala. She liked his sense of humor. He had once granted an audience to a friend of hers. "A good wristwatch," said the enlightened one. "Yes, I think that is the secret to a happy life." Then he said, "Just kidding."

Chika may have related to the Dalai Lama's state of exile. She was shedding her native skin and swathing her soul in India. I was a similar kind of chameleon: a traveler. Together, we explored. Results were mixed. I was receiving the puja, or blessing, in the holy waters of Lake Pushkar, when the administer said, "Now, how much you want to give Brahma?"

I played along: "15 rupees."

"Not enough," he said.

I spit in the water. But we never lost faith, Chika and I; we kept waiting for India to say, "Just kidding."

Chika flew to Minneapolis a year and a half later. We'd put on our pith helmets, I imagined, and break some urban trail. Chika had other ideas. All she wanted to see was the site of Laura Ingalls' home in Walnut Grove.

Apparently, Little House on the Prairie is to Japan what Baywatch is to Germany: quintessentially American and embarrassingly popular. In Japan, however, it's known as Small House on the Prairie.

We drove to Walnut Grove on the Fourth of July. There was a detour, and we found ourselves surrounded by amber waves of grain. Authentic America, no charge. And of interest to Chika.

We pulled into Walnut Grove at noon. The town is tiny; the things unrelated to farming could fit in a seed cap. Cruising Main Street in my white convertible, a city slicker and a Japanese woman, we might as well have been driving the Wienermobile. At the Wilder Museum, Chika headed straight for the gift shop.

For 40 minutes, she sacked the souvenir shelves. Bells, spoons, postcards, bookmarks, and the big-ticket items: two sets of pewter figurines representing the Little House family. But she didn't want Almanzo (not an original family member) or Nellie (she's mean) or the dog (just silly). The total topped $200. Chika wasn't so sure. She snatched the calculator from the sweet clerks, who might have been a contemporary of Laura. "In Japan, this never happen!" she said to me. A public relations woman in an embroidered sweatshirt was summoned to the scene. She discovered the Ingalls were priced inconsistently. The real total was $164. The clerk was in tears at her mistake. I wished I was back in India, apologizing for spitting in their holy water.

It was my nightmare, because it was the clerks' nightmare. And because I was no better. That was me in Athens, slipping in with the moon, snapping a picture of the Acropolis in the morning, then skipping town. Or at Lake Pushkar, being dipped under the weight of my own expectations and wondering why I'd gotten soaked. I was no more Greek for the experience than Homer Simpson, no more Indian than hot dish.

Now, I no longer pretend. Travel, I realize, is relative—one person's Laura is another's Nellie.

The last thing the Little House PR rep said to Chika is now my mantra. Chika had paid and was admiring her Lauras when the woman mentioned, "Of course, you know we're all out of Lauras—thatıs Nellie." And this time, Minnesota being the one place I fully understand, I knew there would be no "just kidding."

Minneapolis writer Tim Gihring continues to travel. His next adventure is homeowning.