Have you ever been to a luau or a native American dance performance? It’s like going to the zoo to see animals in their natural habitat, only it’s not natural; it’s fabricated. I recently had this experience during a repeat visit to the charming little Vietnamese village known as Hoi An.

Like any tourist, I’d been fascinated by the colorful paper lanterns swaying above the narrow shop filled streets. Occasionally, you’ll even see an older woman in a conical straw hat carrying two baskets full of fruit balanced on either end of a thick piece of bamboo straddling her shoulder. Instinctively, you reach for your camera to catch this authentic moment, but once you do the woman comes up to you and asks for money. It turns out she’s not a farmer making money by selling fruit but a reenactor making money by selling an image. I laughed once I realized these women were simply pacing back and forth with the same baskets waiting for unsuspecting tourists to try their hand at getting a “National Geographic” photo. 

It wasn’t the first time I’d made this error. The previous week I’d been on a motorbike tour of the nearby countryside. I told my driver that I wanted to see the “real Vietnam”. He replied, “So you need to see people wearing cone hats and working rice fields? You know we don’t do that in the city, man, and most of the fields are plowed with tractors these days.”

It made me reflect on how disappointed we are when reality doesn’t meet our expectations. I know the first time I went to Bangkok, I expected smoky alleys dotted with opium dens. What I got instead was modern metros and massive shopping malls. If you get outside the city center, you get occasional glimpses of a weathered colonial building listing to the side as its foundation sinks into one of the many canals that once made up the city. Like most American cities, Bangkok had to get rid of its old to make way for the new, but pictures of shopping malls and transit trains and places that look just like where we live wouldn’t really inspire us to travel.

Before we’ve visited a place, we fill our imaginations based on pictures and stories we’ve heard. We remember the ones that suit the experiences we want to have. It’s a rare occasion when a place will match what we expect, and that can leave us disappointed.

For this reason, I appreciate what the actors are doing on the streets and in presentations, giving us a taste of not just history, but a partially fulfilled expectation. The places that make this effort draw hordes of tourists, who of course infuse the local economy. Places like Williamsburg, Virginia and Leavenworth, Washington get busloads of tourists each year, and if it weren’t for this fabricated authenticity, there’d be no reason for people to visit.