The Paris Syndrome

The Paris Syndrome is a term given to the appearance of psychological, pathological effects, in many people who go to visit Paris for the first time, and are let down by what they see and experience, compared with their romantic ideas about the place.

A Japanese psychiatrist, Professor Hiroaki Ota, is credited with coining the term as well as diagnosing the condition, in 1986.

Look straight up, and not around you, or
on the ground

There is another condition - almost exactly the opposite - known as Stendahl syndrome, in which a person experiences heart palpitations and dizziness and even delusions and hallucinations, from coming into close proximity with some well-known or otherwise remarkable work of art.

Apparently the Japanese are the worst affected by the Paris Syndrome because of the incessant depiction in Japanese magazines and media that Paris is nothing but stick-thin women wearing Louis Vuitton high fashion. 

...All the same, I have some sympathy for the sufferers of the syndromes in question, because I must say that very few things that are 'famous' really live up to expectations in reality and moreover, there are very few places that when you get there, are even anything like the pics of them in the tourist brochures.

London, in my own opinion, is one of those places that completely fails to live up to the hype about it, although admittedly, that hype died down I must say, after Thatcher compared to when I was a younger person. It's actually not too bad today, visually, in the sense that when you are walking in the notable streets like Oxford Street - especially the Oxford Square junction part - or Bond Street, the property developers and owners/managers have made things look a lot cleaner and 'newer' than say even ten or twenty years ago when it was still all looking pretty run down on the whole.

But inside the shops and boutiques, all you get is poor quality product substitution... And that was partly the point of my immediate last article here - modern marketing companies behind 'brand names' and industrial-scale output 'sell' descriptions of things that were they the actual real thing, would be fantastic, but they are not; yet they are expensive nonetheless. 

A great camera shot - cleverly lit

It's not so easy to wend one's way through the vast ocean of substitutes masquerading as the real thing, to find the tiny few things that are 'the real thing.' I have long harbored strong doubts about all of this 'billionaire' nonsense. I don't think there's either that many out there, and what there is of them, have so many 'ties' to the money involved, that for all intents and purposes they are more shackled in spending money than the guy on the street corner holding out a tin cup.