Here are buildings whose forms must have once seemed as alien in this terrain as flying saucers.
For the 350,000 real-life migrants - farmers, unemployed workers, office workers - who made the journey during the Dust Bowl years (1931-36) this must have seemed as alien as the Moon.
If being plant-based once seemed as alien to her as fat free butter spray does now, that and the blog have been, she says, "my saving grace.
I suppose the message conveyed was that they had little effect on our lives here in the states, so there was no need to become educated about a country whose people seemed as alien as Martians, so by the time the Iran Hostage Crisis occurred, it was barely a blip on my radar screen.
It might, at first, seem as alien and incomprehensible as an untranslated copy of Tolstoy's "War and Peace" for a non-Russian speaker.
With surveillance cameras everywhere and confidential information floating around the Internet, privacy seems as alien to us as peace did in the Roman empire.
The protesters have made the 20th century seem as alien and remote as the 19th century was to Woolf and her circle.
But a combination of watching those TV shows celebrating our heritage and coastline, as spectacular-looking as anywhere on Earth, and seeing a nation portrayed in the media as a selfish, dangerous place, full of binge-drinking malcontents living in broken communities, made Britain seem as alien to me as anywhere requiring jabs.
To this day, in an area of Paris that I frequent, the horse-butcher takes her place proudly at the twice-weekly street market alongside vendors of fresh seafood, ripe Brie, roast chicken, foie gras, pâté and fare like Andouillette sausage made of porcine entrails, which seems as alien to some palates as horse meat does to the British.
Macdonald cannot at first get over how reptilian she is, "the lucency of her pale, round eyes… the waxy, yellow skin about her Bakelite-black beak… half the time she seems as alien as a snake, a thing hammered of metal and scales and glass".
Dr. Lam, a Toronto physician, covers that territory, too, but he also takes a pioneering look at the particular situation of the modern immigrant doctor, suspended by strong and often opposing ties to profession, cultural heritage and family, with patients who may seem as alien as if from Mars.
