I’ve been to Paris, it certainly has its moments. The French love their intellectuals, can’t pick up after their dogs, and can speak without the slightest trace of irony about ‘race relations in America’ whilst their suburbs burn in rings around their cities. (Anyone else notice how so many French suggest that the Blacks and Arabs are impossible to assimilate into French society and can never be ‘truly’ French…until selection time for the national football squad?)
Well, the Japanese still love France. In fact, they love it so much–and have so idealized the Parisian experience–that when they arrive, it makes them ill.
From Reuters: “Around a dozen Japanese tourists a year need psychological treatment after visiting Paris as the reality of unfriendly locals and scruffy streets clashes with their expectations, a newspaper reported on Sunday.
“A third of patients get better immediately, a third suffer relapses and the rest have psychoses,” Yousef Mahmoudia, a psychologist at the Hotel-Dieu hospital, next to Notre Dame cathedral, told the newspaper Journal du Dimanche.
Accustomed to white gloves and hovering sales people in their home country, the Japanese find the attitude of the French to be, well, sickening:
“Fragile