For example, one evening Adam and I were ordering online delivery pizza (yes, you can do that in Vietnam!) to our hotel room as a special reward for locking ourselves in and completing our taxes. We had done this once before and it went off without a hitch. This time, we waited and waited and waited... and our pizza never came. When we finally called the pizza place, we were told there had been a fire outside their restaurant and they weren't making pizza anymore. And that was that. No call, no e-mail...
Another example is one that anyone who has traveled in developing countries knows well: a menu is not a list of all of your options at a restaurant. It's a potential list of options depending on what ingredients they actually have on hand. Just because a place has an entire page of the menu devoted to yogurt and fruit combinations does not actually mean that they have yogurt... or fruit for that matter.
Hotel rooms have that flashy veneer as well. Our current hotel room (which is in Cambodia, but illustrates the point well) coming in at $7 per night has artfully folded red towels on our beds, and gold crown molding, but when I let them know that the sink wasn't draining, they just took out the clogged pipe and now our sink drains on the floor. A perfectly reasonable solution, given that that is how the shower drains (no tubs or showers here)...But still, it's a reminder that the catering to Western tastes and expectations has outpaced the ability to actually deliver on the image promised... And in that lack of delivery, you find authenticity. Because really, traveling isn't about getting your pizza delivered, ordering off of elaborate menus and staying at pristine hotels. It's about experiencing a world where things aren't always what they seem, and (if you're doing it right) they are never what you expect.