This article considers how, in the process of positioning that is implicit in every interaction, all of us use multiple and often rivalling narratives when we talk about cultural identity and our relationships with new cultural environments. In interviews with newly arrived postgraduate students about their experience of travelling to study abroad, the students use competing block and thread narratives. Block narratives represent an essentialist discourse of culture. As such, they are easily converted into cultural prejudice by blocking the possibility for grasping and sharing at the point of tolerating an Other who can never be like ‘us’. These are default narratives because of the way in which we are brought up in our societies within a global positioning and politics. Thread narratives instead back a critical cosmopolitan discourse of cultural travel and shared meanings across structural boundaries that operate against cultural prejudice. Threads need to be fostered as alternative forms of engagement. Hence there is a place for the researchers to intervene with their own thread narratives. This intervention is both permitted within and backed by a comprehension that researchers join with their participants in the creative intercultural events of the interview.