Important Visitors, Less Important Thoughts

I received some very important visitors this past week: my parents! Loyally trotting the globe to find me in The City of Light just as they had loyally visited me in the Land of Noodle Soup, they arrived this past Saturday and had hardly set foot off the plane before they began seeing the sights and snapping photos. 


Naturally, there were many interesting things to see. After all, this is the city of wonders both large and small. And it is important, sometimes, to notice the little things when one is snapping photos. Things that only Paris can offer, like cops on roller blades:

Like goats in the Jardin des Tuileries (presumably eating the grass to keep it short? But this is as surprising as seeing live goats off the leash in Wahsington Square Park. Is this in the city budget?):

Like animals in even more unexpected places doing even more unlikely things: 

And even like people playing polo. But not water polo. Or British aristocracy polo with horses. BIKE polo, which looked, for lack of a better word, totally badass. 

We even saw the most famous of Parisien landmarks: La Tour Eiffel! It's named after me, pictured below, handing the tower to a younger generation, so that they too can joke about the tower's vulgarity.

Finally, let me say a few words about a disease that is unique to this city, and apparently primarily affects Japanese visitors. It's appropriately named "Paris Syndrome." This is a real disease, testified to by people who know what they're talking about, like psychologists and such, and it's precipitated by having a bad case of culture shock combined with a bad case of totally unrealistic expectations and ideas about what Paris is like. Similar in some ways to "Jerusalem Syndrome" (which you should also look on Google, because that disease is also really interesting), Paris Syndrome seems to hit the Japanese the hardest, presumably because not only is their culture and language almost the complete opposite of France's, but because their media perpetuates some of the most ridiculous lies about what's it's like in Gay Paris. If you watched nothing but Japanese commercials, you'd think that Paris was inhabited by no one except Hermes-wearing Champagne-sipping six-foot size-zero twenty-something supermodels. And although that's an almost perfect description of me, regrettably the government of the city has a little work to do to make those high standards universally adhered to. As a result, many tourists who develop this syndrome actually have a very real mental breakdown and need to cut their trip short. Or camp out in the Japanese Embassy for the remainder of the trip. 

So if you happen to be sitting next to some Japanese tourists on their first visit to Paris, please do your civic duty, and tell them not to get their hopes up too high. If it's anything like Korea, Japan is three times cleaner and a thousand time more polite than Paris, even if they don't have any good cheese.