4 ms·

I never perceived Paris as a particularly welcoming or friendly city, and I imagine few people do. All the things you read about the Gallic Shrug and general ru

by Udo 12y ago

I never perceived Paris as a particularly welcoming or friendly city, and I imagine few people do. All the things you read about the Gallic Shrug and general rudeness are absolutely true there, but I found you can have amazing fun if you just choose to be entertained by it instead. In the end, it all boils down to the fact that in Paris, nobody will help you with anything. On the other hand, it's mostly a city where you don't actually need a lot of help to get by. If you can manage to blend in and not care about strangers, it's quite a fun place. The article itself portrays very well that Paris syndrome is probably not real (in a statistical sense). There is a big number of tourists in the city at any given moment, some of them will statistically snap during their stay. I do like the theory that disillusionment and added stress contribute to the timing, though - especially if the trip was expensive. Since the article mentions it, Jerusalem syndrome is similar but qualitatively different. Many people who go there are not just tourists. I'd wager that for over 90% of travelers there the city has some kind of religious significance. They are essentially pilgrims. And you'd have to be to want to go there: the city itself is a dirty, oppressive mess filled with scary people and shady salesmen. Combining these factors, it wouldn't surprise me if the incidence of Jerusalem syndrome was much higher than Paris, mostly due to the clientele but also the city itself. Now Stendhal syndrome is more interesting: it's a generalized description of these kind of psychotic breaks, though they are mostly understood to be a little bit more benign than Jerusalem syndrome. By definition, these effects are attributed to exposure of a susceptible individual to an object of great personal importance, such as a piece of art. In this context, the same pattern of breakdowns has been studied with tourists who snap while visiting Florence.

contingencies 12y ago
in Paris, nobody will help you with anything This is absolutely untrue. My French is sub-intermediate, I've been perhaps five times, and I've never had a bad experience. Plenty of people have been super friendly and I've had great conversations with people just hanging around on the street waiting for a store to open or having a break from walking. Perhaps the core of the problem here is that many people who visit Paris are not well traveled and have only limited empathy for the seen-it-all-before-99-times-a-day locals. I mean, if I was busy and had a job to do, and by fate alone simply happened to be near some generic tourist attraction or other, and had whiney American/English/Russian/Chinese tourists come and ask me where the closest vegan restaurant or crossfit gym was ten times an hour like clockwork, I'd also get to the point of shrugging. This is the same genre of people who, when you ask them where they are from, answer "America", because they're honestly unaware that it's blatantly obvious to everyone else and the interlocutor was curious about city or state. We can put it down to cultural discontinuities. They are a blessing we should revel in them while we can, because it seems that all roads lead to generic globalized interactions in a minority of languages with increasingly unsophisticated speakers and reduced cultural appreciation.
- Udo 12y ago
  I thought I expressed this in my comment, but I'm not challenging the fact that you can have a good time in Paris. That's not the issue. The issue here is people who do have a bad experience, and if that happens in what manner the city itself may contribute to it. Your comment contains a lot of assumptions about the people visiting Paris, and since I wrote the parent, the assumptions are presumably about me as well. You are mistaken.
  - Mikeb85 12y ago
    People can have a bad experience anywhere. There is nothing specific to Paris. If you showed up in NYC and started randomly accosting people in French you'd definitely have a bad experience. Yet Americans do the same in Paris and wonder why people are rude to them...
    - Udo 12y ago
      That, too, isn't the issue. But I can't answer a comment criticizing my impression of Paris without referring to Paris, can I? Also, please refer to my first comment, I was trying to make a more general case you might agree with.
- demallien 12y ago
  No, Paris is objectively bad for this - even French tourists from other regions will say so. Even Parisians will say so. That said, it is an error to attribute it to any racial characteristics, as French people outside of Paris (and to a lesser extent Marseille) are absolutely lovely and welcoming. It's more a case of the stress of living in a big city, and in that respect mirrors the reputations that New York and London have in their own country (it always makes me chuckle to hear Americans complaining about how abrupt New Yorkers are, as a non-American I consider the baseline of friendliness of Americans to be so high that even the lower than average New Yorker still rates high on the friendliness scale in a global sense).
  - Mikeb85 12y ago

by Udo 12y ago

contingencies 12y ago

in Paris, nobody will help you with anything This is absolutely untrue. My French is sub-intermediate, I've been perhaps five times, and I've never had a bad experience. Plenty of people have been super friendly and I've had great conversations with people just hanging around on the street waiting for a store to open or having a break from walking. Perhaps the core of the problem here is that many people who visit Paris are not well traveled and have only limited empathy for the seen-it-all-before-99-times-a-day locals. I mean, if I was busy and had a job to do, and by fate alone simply happened to be near some generic tourist attraction or other, and had whiney American/English/Russian/Chinese tourists come and ask me where the closest vegan restaurant or crossfit gym was ten times an hour like clockwork, I'd also get to the point of shrugging. This is the same genre of people who, when you ask them where they are from, answer "America", because they're honestly unaware that it's blatantly obvious to everyone else and the interlocutor was curious about city or state. We can put it down to cultural discontinuities. They are a blessing we should revel in them while we can, because it seems that all roads lead to generic globalized interactions in a minority of languages with increasingly unsophisticated speakers and reduced cultural appreciation.

Udo 12y ago
I thought I expressed this in my comment, but I'm not challenging the fact that you can have a good time in Paris. That's not the issue. The issue here is people who do have a bad experience, and if that happens in what manner the city itself may contribute to it. Your comment contains a lot of assumptions about the people visiting Paris, and since I wrote the parent, the assumptions are presumably about me as well. You are mistaken.
- Mikeb85 12y ago
  People can have a bad experience anywhere. There is nothing specific to Paris. If you showed up in NYC and started randomly accosting people in French you'd definitely have a bad experience. Yet Americans do the same in Paris and wonder why people are rude to them...
  - Udo 12y ago
    That, too, isn't the issue. But I can't answer a comment criticizing my impression of Paris without referring to Paris, can I? Also, please refer to my first comment, I was trying to make a more general case you might agree with.
demallien 12y ago
No, Paris is objectively bad for this - even French tourists from other regions will say so. Even Parisians will say so. That said, it is an error to attribute it to any racial characteristics, as French people outside of Paris (and to a lesser extent Marseille) are absolutely lovely and welcoming. It's more a case of the stress of living in a big city, and in that respect mirrors the reputations that New York and London have in their own country (it always makes me chuckle to hear Americans complaining about how abrupt New Yorkers are, as a non-American I consider the baseline of friendliness of Americans to be so high that even the lower than average New Yorker still rates high on the friendliness scale in a global sense).
- Mikeb85 12y ago