It's often said that the closest interaction many Americans have with other countries' cultures is through food. That kind of culinary diplomacy is particularly common in Washington, D.C., where immigrants from all over the world have cooked up a diverse food scene.

The Sochi Winter Olympic and Paralympic Games have ended. The opening ceremony for the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games is still more than six years away. As the Tokyo Organizing Committee is forming, this seems like an appropriate moment to think about Tokyo in terms of the recent Sochi experience.

For all the official rhetoric about the need for Kansai’s prefectures to set themselves apart from each other, let alone from the rest of the country, the local bureaucracies too often have a herd mentality when it comes to planning and promoting tourism campaigns.

More than a century ago, Theodor Herzl wrote a book in which he described Israel as an old new land. For the public, with its archeological digs and religious sites, Israel definitely conjures images of the old. The new, not so much.

I have traveled to dozens of countries, but my trip to North Korea this past February was the most unforgettable experience of my life. My plan of going to a country with a “totalitarian” regime, known for its chronic famine and political oppression, intrigued many of my peers in China.

Crimea, which made its debut in most Americans’ consciousness by way of being recently invaded by Russia, is an extremely picturesque tourist destination. While news media is inundated by images of Russian military forces occupying the Ukrainian peninsula, the businesses that depend on Crimea’s normally-robust $5 billion tourism industry are wringing their hands.

Remember the Sochi Olympics? Yeah. Me, neither. There’s been so much focus on Ukraine, we almost forget that just a short time ago we were talking about the “twizzles” of ice dancing. Those were good times. The Sochi Olympics were widely considered a success. They helped introduce a new image of Russia to the world.

Every year, select students from the USC Master of Public Diplomacy program at USC Annenberg travel abroad to conduct field research, which furthers the study of public diplomacy and international communications. This year, the Class of 2014 selected São Paulo, Brazil for its unique position in world politics.