It happens that a friend of mine who was in the Peace Corps brought a friend from rural Malawi out to San Diego. <PERSON> wasn't unaware of the modern world, in fact he at one time had owned a moped to drive into the small town 25 miles away, but even so the trip was constant sensory overload for him. Some things that REALLY bowled him over were:
Pavement everywhere. Malawi's "major highways" are two-lane unpainted asphalt roads. There's a bit more asphalt in the biggest cities, but most towns have dirt roads only, and villages just have paths. In America, he saw very little GROUND anywhere. Even trees had to grow in little squares of ground cut in the concrete. Magical (synthetic) things everywhere. In a rural village, pretty much anything you look at, you can see what it's made of. 121
Hut walls are mud, rope and twine are grass, tools are wood and forged metal, lanterns are made of metal and melted sand, paint is made of ground up rocks. But here and there are objects like toothbrushes and plastic tarps made of incomprehensible materials that simply do not exist in nature, and no one can imagine how they were made. In a modern setting, EVERYTHING is unnatural like that, and there's no guessing how ANY of this stuff was made. Even paint and asphalt don't look like simple rock mixtures. Abundance. <PERSON> was used to seeing an occasional car or rarely an airplane. He had watched TV at a bar in a big town 25mi from his home a few times. That same town had a Coca-Cola billboard that was HUGE (to him) and BEAUTIFUL (because it was painted red). But in America, on a given day he'd see more of these things than he'd ever imagined existed or seen in the rest of his life.
So, you might get the idea that <PERSON> never reacted to the things we THOUGHT he'd react to. It didn't matter if we took him to a friend's house, a movie theatre, or a strip club, he'd just be amazed by the colorful lights, the carpets, etc... 861