A mistake travel guides — and, subsequently, travelers — frequently make is to act like cultures never change or advance. This is particularly true in Asia, where centuries of Orientalist mystique have left Western travel writers speaking of even minor cultural differences as if they make East and Southeast Asians another species of humanity entirely.
Where a guidebook or tour leader might naturally explore both the modern and the traditional in a city like Amsterdam or Copenhagen or London, proudly drawing the connections between the new and the old, there’s a tendency in Asian travel to pretend like it’s not 2020, like the Silk Road has been newly-established, and like nothing that’s happened in the last 1000 years is worthy of any consideration. Hip young artists reimagining traditional art forms and themes through graffiti? Nope, ancient Buddhist reliquary is the only thing that defines modern Asia. (Maybe if you’re really lucky, Western powers have been involved in a land war and there’s a war museum that merits mention among an itinerary that’s otherwise 98% dynastic pottery and disused temples.)
That is, of course, totally nuts and wouldn’t fly in any more familiar setting. Sure, people go to the Pioneer Living History museum outside of Phoenix to see how early Western US settlers lived. You can have a similar experience at similar attractions in dozens of North American and European cities. But nobody walks away thinking that’s representative of modern life — unless they’re in Asia, where clearly everyone still practices traditional calligraphy and has never heard of a hamburger and dedicates years of their life to a monastic education.
At Crossing the Date Line, it’s my goal to point you to sights and destinations and experiences and foods that will let you experience a fuller range of a place, from the traditional to the bleeding-edge. Too many guides act like a “foreign” culture is by definition static, but most people in every other country are in the 21st century with the rest of us: they’ve heard about cell phones and the Internet and Yeezy and Spotify. There’s a McDonald’s in effectively every major world city. Governments are funding tech startups in college towns you’ve never heard of to serve needs you’ve never had.
You can absolutely better understand a place (whether it’s home or thousands of miles away) by understanding where it came from, but to really understand that place, you should also experience and appreciate where that place is and where it’s going. History’s important, but by definition, it’s only the past.
Some of the greatest things you’ll find across the globe are the mash-ups and modern evolutions driven by creative locals in the present.
We cross the date line to experience living cultures.