A Japanese man walks out into the cobbled streets. His sandals make contact with yet another little dog shit gateaux left stinking in the street. Aghast he steps back and bumps into a young couple with stained nicotine fingers feeding each other croissants, who glare at him and laugh derisively as they walk off to their mouldy apartment above a sex shop to noisily make love while Edith Piaf plays on a gramophone. A pigeon in a beret somehow shits into the mans’ chino pocket and onto his Louis Vuitton passport cover. A man on a moped beeps at him to get out of the road and then steals his passport as he glides past, throwing the passport cover in a puddle as he thunders off into the night to go and smoke cigarettes under the light of a lamppost. The Japanese man glares up at the twinkling Eiffel tower.

“Fuck you too, Paris!” he says and pulling out his phone, books the first flight home.

When i first heard about Paris syndrome, i went through a cycle of emotions. The first i’m afraid, was mirth – pure joyful mirth. I laughed myself inside-out at the thought of disappointed tourists from Tokyo lining up to strike the Eiffel tower with a rolled up newspaper, or buying models of the Sacre Couer to throw in the seine.

But then i took a different view. I think part of the hilarity was the assumption that it couldn’t be real – what place on Earth more closely matches it’s reputation and image than Paris? – but reading more and more accounts, i started to think that it was more of a genuine problem than i realised.

Described as “extreme shock at discovering that Paris is different from their expectations“, Paris syndrome is a form of culture shock and is believed to manifest in a variety of psychiatric symptoms such as delusions, hallucinations, paranoia and even psychosomatic symptoms like dizziness, tachycardia, sweating and vomiting. It has yet to be formerly classified as a mental disorder but around 20 suspected cases appear to occur throughout France each year. Though it appears that the Condition tends to mostly affect Japanese women with very little travel experience on their first long distance trip, not much else is understood about what exactly is happening.

The way Paris is presented to the Japanese – as a heightened playground and Instagram background for immaculately dressed fashion models to serenely float across – seems mostly to blame for creating the gulf between what the sufferers expect and what they find. When i first went, it was so completely what i expected it to be that i do think it contributed to my enjoyment of the place as there’s an undeniable satisfaction in arriving somewhere to find it just how you’d imagined. My perception of Paris matched the images i’d seen of it. But my image of Paris wasn’t built from years of seeing edited Instagram posts with fake clouds, or from an era where anyone can imperceptibly alter, frame or otherwise edit the images they present from a trip. What if in the process of playing with presentation and perception we are creating a fictional version of places that reality can’t compete with?

Once when venturing to Antalya in Turkey I was seeking something out i’d briefly seen while fishing for inspiration on Pinterest. It was called “the stone mirror” and it seemed to be a street where the ground was so finely polished that it looked as though people were walking on the clouds reflected from the sky above. When I got to the street i quickly realised that it was just an ordinary dusty street – what i think had been happening is that lame optical illusion where people take a photo using the screen of a reflective electrical device to create a mirrored effect. The “stone mirror” was a monument that didn’t exist, a site that couldn’t be seen. This is a relatively new phenomenon, but there are more – recent stories tell of a temple that enterprising locals are charging people to have a picture taken in an archway in front of a reflecting pool., except just as before this is just an optical illusion and no such pool exists. The locals just hold their phones in front of the camera and before you know it their neighbourhood has a wonder of the world that people will queue in front of – even after they discover it isn’t there.

This i think presents two solutions. If the issue is in the discrepancy between what you think you’re going to find and what is actually there, the key seems to be in either not visiting somewhere that you have a strong image of so that you’re not upset if it doesn’t match up, or perhaps the answer is in not allowing whether a place is the same as you expected it to be to define whether you’re glad you went or not.

Personally i’m a happier traveller now that I’ve readjusted my expectations. I am rarely disappointed in a destination – i wonder if this is because i have a randomised approach to where i go, which means that i go places based on the desire to go somewhere more than it is to arrive somewhere specific. Or i think it might be in the sheer number of trips i make. I’ve learnt now that the success of a trip lies not in going to the “right place” but in finding what’s right about the place you’ve gone. That can be harder to do in some places than others, (i tried to find what was special about Prague but my favourite part was the flight back if i’m honest).

I think an adjustment as simple as putting the love of travel before the satisfaction of ticking off reflective roads and to other sights that don’t exist is a better way to avoid resentful evenings swearing at monuments. If only that (fictional) Japanese man had realised that Paris was not his to invent, but his to discover – it wasn’t in him, it was out there – and if he hadn’t liked that first street there were a thousand more to see. With all those possibilities you don’t need a reflective screen to see something amazing, you just need open eyes and an open mind.