The Paris Olympics has been going on largely without incident, but reports from the Paris streets have been touched by a strange air of deflation. Over a million tickets set aside for the events have gone unsold, and hopeful revenue projections from the city’s businesses will not come anywhere close to being met. Visitors tell stories of Olympics parties half-full — of dance floors half occupied — as people either go straight from the games to their hotels, or simply never showed up at all.
It’s not talk of a mass ghosting at the Olympics. The stands are full for many of the competitions, and booking a hotel during this month would have still been incredibly expensive. It sounds more like that nagging sense of energy not meeting expectation, more and more each day, like that feeling you get when you walk into most American restaurants these days.
There’s a psychological phenomenon known as Paris Syndrome. It’s found most commonly in Japanese tourists, but it’s not exclusive to them, and it arises from a profound disconnect between what people expect of Paris and what they see when they get there. A particularly acute form of “culture shock.” Symptoms include severe anxiety, hallucinations, delusional states, and psychosomatic issues such as dizziness, sweating, and vomiting. These can be brought simply by walking down a Parisian street and looking around for a few seconds. Sometimes it happens as soon as people get off the plane.
The Japanese are notorious Francophiles. Their cities are dotted by thousands of Parisian-style cafes, bakeries, and bookstores, and Paris often shows up either as the actual setting of or the aesthetic inspiration for their animation and artwork. They’ll spend years dreaming of and planning for their eventual pilgrimage to the City of Lights, their heads full of images of the Paris that once was. But more and more they return with sad stories. Not told in the cynical way a disappointed American college student might, but in the way of powerful disappointment and sincere dismay. The dirtiness of it, the increasing danger of violent crime, the vagrancy, the sexual harassment of Japanese women encounter in the streets. And what they’ll describe as a strangely specific malaise (a French word, after all).
The overall wrongness of it.
The Japanese are often polite in their descriptions. Their neighbors in China are a bit more direct. A recent poll that asked Chinese tourists to give their concise impressions of every European country said the following about France: “There are so many black people there.”
Not the most comprehensive or sensitive diagnosis, but surely no small part of the disconnect those suffering from Paris Syndrome feel between expectation and reality.
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