Handbag Snatchers Increase Ill Feeling
Posted on December 21, 2006
I’d always thought of Japanese tourists as a sturdier bunch, but it turns out that they’re oddly susceptible to psychological crises in Paris. For some of them, having their idealized preconceptions of the city shattered by the reality is enough to send them into mumbling paroxysms. I found it hard to believe, even after reading the article. I think most of us learn by adulthood - or even earlier - that most of our hopes or dreams come complete with a spring-loaded punchline, and that the majority of things are quite simply not as they seem. Is life in Japan so predictable that the Japanese don’t receive this cosmic tutelage?
Japanese tourists retain their identities at Diocletian’s palace in Split, Croatia.
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I’ve read a bit on the ancient Japan and it seems that their whole mentality was shaped upon no-matter-of-what loyalty to bushido, samurai law that made every action, choice or decision stark white or black. I guess that you can now see a lot of this heritage in their daily life patterns - as they apparently (and sadly) can’t live without a clearly set and predictable pattern…
It’s funny cause when I went to Paris for the first time I was prepared to have my romantic visions replaced by suffocating smog, trendy snobbism and general mess. But instead, I have fallen in love with Montmartre little cafes, with the French having their dejeuner on the banks of the river Seine, with their natural elegance and pleasure of life. A cure, not a poison for an open mind…