{"id":59709,"date":"2025-02-13T10:37:18","date_gmt":"2025-02-13T10:37:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.outthere.travel\/?p=59709"},"modified":"2025-10-09T12:03:28","modified_gmt":"2025-10-09T11:03:28","slug":"the-layover-paris-syndrome","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.outthere.travel\/the-layover-paris-syndrome\/","title":{"rendered":"The Layover:
Paris syndrome"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Paris is always a good idea \u2013 except when it\u2019s not. In the latest edition of The Layover, just in time for Valentine\u2019s Day, Zack Cahill explores the lesser-known state of extreme disappointment known as Paris syndrome, which has (mostly Japanese) visitors fall out of love with the city of… well, love<\/em>?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Let’s start with a story. About ten years ago, a friend of mine was maid of honour at her best friend\u2019s wedding in Toronto. I remember the build-up to it. They\u2019d been together six years. It was a lavish three-day event, two wealthy families pulling out all the stops and flexing their fiscals. Hundreds of guests flew in from around the globe to some private island. Imagine them all, rich people with booming voices, tight-bodied and toothy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The wedding went perfectly, my friend nailed her maidly duties and everybody had a great time burning money into the night. Anyway, the bride and groom took a plane to Bangkok the next day. Early in the flight, the bride asked if she could borrow the groom’s iPad, and in an act of outrageous folly, he let her, not anticipating she would promptly stumble on emails detailing a sordid affair stretching back years. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The scene haunts me. Imagine being sat beside them (actually, they were probably in First Class, so imagine being in the pod nearby). Her, wedding body honed and tanned, viscerally apoplectic, berating him over the divider. Him, silent and ashen-faced, pressed into his fully reclinable seat. The flight from Toronto to their layover in Hong Kong was 18 hours. Imagine it. The inability to escape. Just 18 hours trapped in a tube with your new wife and your ex who are the same person. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hemingway once said \u201cNever go on trips with anyone you do not love\u201d, and as someone who\u2019s been to Paris with an ex who later hacked my emails, I wholeheartedly agree. But Paris didn\u2019t just backfire for me. For around 20 tourists a year, the city of love is enough to bring on a strange psychological condition known appropriately as Paris syndrome<\/strong><\/a>. It seems these folks are so crushed that Paris is not the city of their dreams that they experience an actual mental breakdown.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Bizarrely, only Japanese tourists seem to suffer from this. \u201cIn Japanese shops, the customer is king\u201d, said Bernard Delage of Jeunes Japon, an association that helps Japanese families settle in France, in conversation with The Guardian. Japan also has a famously low crime rate. Imagine the poor visitor from Kyoto, used to clean streets and benevolent smiles, arriving in the storied city of love, to be met by French \u201chospitality\u201d. You start to understand why Paris syndrome is a thing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\n
\"A<\/a><\/figure>\n
Just like the movies: when the City of Lights delivers, it\u2019s a stunner. But when it doesn\u2019t, Paris syndrome can turn the holiday of your dreams into a nightmare.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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Stern-faced waiters who openly despise you, handbag snatchers and scammers in Montmartre. For us Europeans, it\u2019s all part of the deal. We know whether we place our order in disgusting English or butcher it in French they\u2019re going to spit in our espresso: it\u2019s the Paris experience, baby (and we love it<\/strong><\/a>)! <\/p>\n\n\n\n

For us, it\u2019s an anecdote. \u201cYou simply must go to Paris. They\u2019re absolute bastards\u201d. For the Japanese, it\u2019s a full-blown 2008 Britney. The Japanese embassy has a hotline for the afflicted. You can actually check in to recovery clinics when you get home, where, presumably you have a nice lie down and order tea from someone who doesn\u2019t hope you die in a fire. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Much like those who became depressed after seeing James Cameron\u2019s Avatar and realising their life would never compare to Pandora, the Japanese tourists had fallen in love with an idea, not a place. And sometimes the version you have in your head isn\u2019t as good as the real thing… which is exactly like a relationship. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

And travelling with your lover \u2013 as Brad Pitt and Jennifer Anniston learned on New Year\u2019s Eve 2005 on that fateful beach in the Bahamas \u2013 can really put a relationship to the test. Like buying a puppy together, travel will either draw you closer or prise open the cracks in your relationship, exposing them like the sucking chest wounds they are. Travel will not fix things. It will magnify whatever\u2019s there already. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is all about expectations. In AA circles, they say unrealistic expectations are a defect of character. This is as true of romance as it is of travel. We want the Disney movie love, the perfect partner, who never gets tetchy in the immigration queue or misplaces their passport when the airport Uber is outside. And just like the Japanese tourists who envisioned Paris as a dreamy, cobblestoned utopia, only to find an overpriced latte and a pickpocket, we fall in love with the idea at our peril.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But neither love nor travel is about perfection. They\u2019re about dealing with the ups and downs together. And maybe that\u2019s the real test: not whether your partner sweeps you off your feet under the Eiffel Tower, but whether you can laugh when the hotel with a view is a shithole with mice. In the end, the best trips \u2013 and the best relationships \u2013 aren\u2019t the ones that go exactly to plan. They\u2019re the ones where, despite the chaos, you still want to do it together.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Illustration by Martin Perry, photography via Unsplash<\/em><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/div>\n<\/span>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Paris is always a good idea \u2013 except when it\u2019s not. 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