Having spent many years traveling the globe as a fashion model, PASSIONS' Galen Gering is a bit more sophisticated than his Harmony-born-and-bred character, Luis. In fact, after extended tours-of-duty living abroad in such exotic ports-of-call as Paris and Milan, Gering admits he actually experienced a bit of culture shock when it came time to return stateside permanently.

"The whole experience made me feel very strange about living in America. There were a lot of things that I didn't necessarily understand. Europe for the most part was a very simple life. Very family-oriented. Go to the store every day, get fresh food for each night. Their refrigerators are very small, so they don't store stuff for periods of time. It's a total different quality of life ... everything isn't 'supersized' there," he says with a laugh.

The European "quality, not quantity" principle is something that's carried over into Gering's love of architecture. "That really impacted me a lot. For instance where I live now in Santa Monica, so many of the old houses fit well architecturally with the lot that they sat on. But a lot of them have been torn down and replaced with these mansions -- 5,000 square feet houses on 7,500 square feet. So I really don't subscribe to the idea that bigger is always better. Unfortunately, too many people fail to realize the value of historic things, things with character and roots. Usually, in any great city that you travel to, it's those things that make up so much of the charm."