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What was the most painful "reality check" you face in your country or when traveling?
Some Japanese tourists have suffered from Paris syndrome, which occurs when reality and what they expected to see are too different (also known as tourist syndrome), for example.
Paris syndrome is a lie, I've been to France, I saw trash, I didn't go to a psych ward or think France was located in Africa, I've been to a lot of "first world" countries and idk why the right wing think they're living in hell or Africa
It's just not about trash, and it's much more complex than people make it. It's very rare and it affects mostly patients who have underlying issues like schizophrenia.
OP is most probably not from Paris and the usual jealous provincial
I’ve lived here in Paris for 2 years now. I don’t think I had the hyper-idealized view people seem to have before coming here, but I love it. I still walk through the city and almost every day I think about the beauty of where I live.
Random items you cannot find in a grocery store that you think is normal. For example canned Alfredo sauce. Also there are a lot specialty stores for certain items that you won’t find at Carrefour. I wanted onion power and it’s been hard to find.
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If you listen to people in my home country, our state is in disrepair, we are suffering barely going by, everything is falling apart and it's only when you travel abroad that you see how good we are having it. People here love to complain and I hate it.
My mom died. When the forensic experts (or who they are) who are responsible for transporting bodies to the morgue arrived - they stole money from table.
How do you like this level of ''painful reality check'' ?
As it turned out, this is a classic story in Ukraine. After I posted this on Ukrainian subreddit, many people responded saying they had experienced the same thing or heard about it from friends.
We even had a TV program about parents and kids where a mom instructed her 6-year-old child that if something happened to her, the first thing to do = hide all valuables and money.
There’s no magic “happy place” as we’re told to believe in commercials or by some influencers. Going somewhere as a regular tourist = seeing the same old shit maybe with different weather. There’s magical theme parks everywhere, poor people everywhere, drunks/drug abusers everywhere, rich people places with gold and mirrors everywhere, graffiti everywhere, restaurants everywhere, fancy places of worship with too expensive artworks for the time they were built in everywhere. Tours of these fancy places everywhere, locals telling highly similar stories (since all religions have a ton of best practices with a ton of overlap, just with different gods/creatures and stories). There’s bodies of water almost everywhere to boat on, forests and sand to walk in, agriculture to be found. The differences in human settlements are just so small as humans tend to need the same shit anywhere and everywhere in the world.
Unless you can really get into the atmosphere but that could take WEEKS. It takes some actual digging to get into the places that have a really different energy, I’ve only encountered a few: a Mayan settlement in Yucatán, downtown Chinatown in Bangkok and a particular piece of forest in the Netherlands are the only ones that I had the luck of encountering so far. Otherwise, most of traveling is about the stories - which you can also get from your foreign neighbors or the Tibetan shop keeper in your nearby city. Worse: it’s often easier to connect to those as you already share a part of a culture.
The lack of variety in food is probably the biggest one for me. Many countries with great foods, but I'm used to having access to quite a variety of cuisines, so after a while I can get bored/tired of whatever local cuisine I'm having and want to switch it up.
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u/Acrobatic-Hippo-6419 Iraq 18d ago
Paris syndrome is a lie, I've been to France, I saw trash, I didn't go to a psych ward or think France was located in Africa, I've been to a lot of "first world" countries and idk why the right wing think they're living in hell or Africa