"things are different here – uncollected observations of a restless traveller" is a collection of observations made during years of traveling. Some of the things that are different here were observed by the book's author himself, some of them were observed in other people's descriptions of their own travels. The collection is a riddle composed of empirical facts, generalizations and popular assumptions, an encyclopedia of truisms that may be true here – whereever that might be – but not necessarily anywhere else.