Does the economy have you down?
Are you seeing great travel bargains from hard-up travel companies, but you’re too broke yourself to take advantage of those deals to Asia?
The Chinatown sections of San Francisco and New York are well-known, but I found 5 other pockets of Asian shopping, dining and culture for you to visit in the United States (frustratingly, there are very few good tourism-related Web sites for these places:)
- Koreatown in Los Angeles - The K-town has good food (did I say good food?) and frenetic nightlife.
- Japantown in San Francisco – This is a fairly geographically bounded, well-organized spot in the city, with a variety of shopping and restaurants, many indoors in the Japan Center.
- Little Saigon in Houston, Texas – anchored by the ironically-named Hong Kong Supermarket on Bellaire Blvd, this is one of the largest Vietnamese communities in North America. If you visit, tune your car radio to Little Saigon Radio, KYND 1520 AM/KJOJ 880 AM.
- There is a large Filipino community in Las Vegas – I found a rather flashy community Website but not much else.
- Indians/South Asians in Millbourne, Pennsylvania (near Philadelphia) – It has a majority Indian/South Asian population.
I was surprised that the official tourism Websites for these cities either had no information at all about their ethnic Asian communities/neighborhoods, or what they did have didn’t seem to be geared to encouraging tourists to go there.
Is this because the tourism bureaus don’t have representatives of these ethnic groups working on staff, or advocating for their community as a tourism destination, so it’s “out of sight, out of mind?”
A-hem! Hello, Seattle! Not only do we have the lovely remodeled Wing Luke Asian Museum, a new Chinatown gate, the Seattle Asian Art Museum, we’ve also go great places to eat Cambodian, Vietnamese, Japanese, Thai, Indian, Korean… and a zillion festivals to attend too. A-HEM!
Vancouver, just north of the border, also awesome. They don’t call it Hongcouver for nothing, though really, it’s Richmond,just south of Vancouver that’s got the real Asia flair.
Hi Pam,
I hear you – I based the post on ethnic population sizes in cities where I didn’t really expect to find big Asian sections (or majorities, as in the case with Millbourne, PA.) I knew Seattle had a large Asian influence, but was intrigued by findings like the Filipino community in Las Vegas and the Vietnamese in Houston.