The Subway That Sunk
theverge.com
theverge.com
No knowledge of local culture, customs, knowledge, etc needed in any city in the world. The exact same hollow experience over and over again. And yet these people pat themselves on the back for it. They instagram every moment of this manufactured and repetitive experience.
We're losing a lot of culture with globalization. A lot of what makes the different places in the world unique.
You can still find real cultures but you have to dig. Everywhere that tourists go have become upscale McDonald’s - identical the world over.
It’s what people want. They don’t actually want all the messy problems associated with actually interacting with a different culture, they just want to tell themselves they have.
I did venture into these off-brand areas a few times, and it is sort of night and day; you know you are out of your element, and you want to go back to the tourist zones ASAP. You really gain nothing by going outside them. It's not "local color" it's "prey on the Gringos" time out there. It is not pretty.
When I travel, I desire to feel like I live there. An AirBnB with nice amenities, the occasional expensive cocktail(s), and some mainstream event, but the rest needs to be as authentic as possible. And that involves accepting some possible discomfort whether it be from language, cuisine, commute, etc. Where comfort isn't, experience is!
“Assimilating local culture” is always the same stuff: you meet happy people with nothing, happy people with something, and unhappy people with nothing, and unhappy people with something. Turns out that - besides food and the nuances of local politics - the whole world is the same mesh. There is not much else to see. I had better conversations in Michigan with immigrant Uber drivers in a 15 minutes ride than spending one week in their country.
For a while it was fun to “go with the flow”, ultimately after so many experiences I realized that it is not the place that made the experiences fun, but the mindset. By changing my mindset I had an equal amount of fun experiences in my hometown without having to travel hundreds or thousands of miles away.
Sure..I can say this now after traveling quite a bit, perhaps we can call it experience and wiseness.
The only thing that is truly memorable are the landscapes, and the things you see: temples, pyramids, you name it. But even then, I would say that sightseeing doesn’t really mean that there is any expansive mixing with the local population. It’s a sterile experience, so to speak.
But it also sounds like you were a little burnt out on travel. I have lived abroad and found most regions of the world are quite different and have something unique and worth experiencing. Different countries are not just different themes on the same OS in my experience. People do live in meaningfully different ways. Out ability to take in new experiences that is finite and needs recharging though.
My wife and I went to Greenland just pre-covid, where almost no one speaks english, no signs are in english, and there was a very strong culture of which we were very much not a part. We were able to experience a small amount of it thanks to the kindness of our host. There is a program run by the official government tourism agency that allows Greenlandic residents to host tourists in their homes as a Bed & Breakfast. With patience and lots of english-danish translations we were able to communicate well enough to get around.
I would go back in a second and much prefer a place like that over a more generic setting like described in this article.
That said, when our two weeks there were up, it was very nice to meet a Canadian in the airport going home and hold a real conversation with someone besides my wife in my own language for the first time in a half a month.
I'm sure there are trips I could take that would be truly different. I used to have a coworker who would plan trips to the Congo or North Korea or places like that. (She'd go completely on her own, by the way.) I really have no desire to take a trip like that either!
Wait until you try it in, ... well, Mexico?
(Mostly a joke but actual Mexican food is not what people usually expect or want.)
I don't like food nearly enough to travel around the world for it, however.
It's very different travel experience, if you have translator in the phone and navigation and don't need to rely on locals as in older days, I'm glad I experienced traveling prior smartphones went mainstream, I'd have much less stories to tell if I had contemporary smartphone.
It wasn't laptops. People had those. Kids came and did their homework and hung out. A bigger deal was the smoking ban. That kneecapped them because all the underage kids went to these places to smoke cigarettes and feel like grown-ups. The rents all went up to the point where they couldn't survive. But the real ending was when socialization moved online. Sitting around a coffee place meeting new people just isn't done in America anymore. Coffee houses are purely workspaces now, and it doesn't matter for that purpose if they're all the same.
What socializing there is moved to bars, where alcohol makes it easier. But the first question now is always "what do you do?" It's a shame. People are thinking like tinder robots instead of actually getting into conversations about stuff.
The reason the coffeehouses died is that American-style global culture has no room for, and actively discourages unmediated and spontaneous social interaction. You can't monetize it on any kind of large scale, and it may be politically dangerous. This is actually why I live in Portland and love it... it's one of the last hold-outs.
[edit] final thought: The larger trend of homogenization is something I've started calling a "change in the texture of the world" in the past decade. Many of the efficiencies are sold as improvements, but they diminish the lived experience of encountering the world, and the serendipity and uniqueness of one's life in it. A soulless, fully automated utopia leaves no room for aesthetic, intellectual or emotional diversity and strangles personal growth. The lack of differences between places eliminates the grounds on which to discover personal preferences.
I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing though — we just have a higher bar of defaults. The Airbnb-homogeneity is just setting a higher default bar of quality; anyone is welcome to do more work and break out of it. It's just hard. It's like Airbnb (and similar) is setting a Strunk & White's "Elements of Style" to interior design.
A similar kind of thing probably happened when newspapers and magazines started making certain looks trending, and everyone started doing that thing. We're just seeing that at a global scale now.
To me, the biggest single change wrought by the rapid spread of trends globally is that the cycle of co-opting has gotten shorter. Circular references to culture have become bounded by smaller and smaller time frames, and present an increasingly impoverished and banal version of wink-and-nod. What was once stepping into the past became ironic, and what was ironic is now unacknowledged and treated with a straight face. As a result of superficializing everything about the past, original ideas have dried up for lack of historical knowledge to fuel them, as nostalgia-mining tapped out the entire 20th Century.
Look no further than the food-truck to brick-and-mortar to Whole Foods pipeline, or the same that's happened in the music industry from YouTube to Top 40.
Should we really attribute this to digital platforms in particular, or are digital platforms not rather just today's mass media amplifying trends more or less in the same way as other media have done in the past? I think of the global fashion and music trends of the 20th century: business suites everywhere, blue jeans, rock music ...
Something else I don't like is at the bottom where it says "There are 68 comments. Read them." No, I will not read the comments. It comes off as excessively demanding.