Tuesday, October 24, 2006

All sushi'd out.

French boy and I made it home from Japan safe and sound.

We had such a great time. I can't even express how much fun we had! It was more fun than we could have ever imagined. It was worth every penny we spent and then some. Screw New York......I can't wait to get back to Japan. (Wait. Did I really just say that?) Anyhooo. I will try to break up postings and photos about our trip into 4 or 5 posts. I'll have to keep it short or I will wear myself out trying to describe everything.

But untill I get a chance to sort through our 600 photos I thought I'd post this hilarious article about that I found on Yahoo this morning about "Paris Syndrome". French boy and I definitely suffered from a little bit of it as soon as we landed at CDG in Paris.

A little excerpt from the article:

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.

Already this year, Japan's embassy in Paris has had to repatriate at least four visitors -- including two women who believed their hotel room was being bugged and there was a plot against them. Previous cases include a man convinced he was the French "Sun King", Louis XIV, and a woman who believed she was being attacked with microwaves, the paper cited Japanese embassy official Yoshikatsu Aoyagi as saying.

"Fragile travellers can lose their bearings. When the idea they have of the country meets the reality of what they discover it can provoke a crisis," psychologist Herve Benhamou told the paper.The phenomenon, which the newspaper dubbed "Paris Syndrome", was first detailed in the psychiatric journal Nervure in 2004.

C'est triste, mais c'est drole, non? C'est "driste"!

Japan write up coming soon!

1 comment:

buzzgirl said...

I read that article about Paris Syndrome too. Time to lower your expectations, people!

Welcome back. I can't wait to hear all about it.