The other cultural things are interesting, about the 'shocking' difference in body language, and formality, but then it seems a bit suspect that tourists would have no expectations of how people would behave in another country in a different continent (though confusingly they have failed expectations of how the place should look!) Hmmm. Sounds like a counter-intuitive Paris tourist board campaign: 'Paris is not really ossified and boring! It's so gritty you'll turn mental!'
Anyway, I'm guessing most people take their mental disorders with them on holiday, especially those who like a bit o' grief tourism (known variously as Thanatourism, after the Greek personificaton of death, or just dark tourism). This site got updated recently-ish, with this entry about the Drancy detention center set up by Vichy government. According to this entry, very little remains of the building that housed 4,000 Jews, only four miles from the Paris city centre. I found reading the description pretty horrific, though I don't think wanting to see this kind of thing, the remaining buildings is that weird. Last time, I was in Paris I went to see the Catacombs, and Pere Lachaise (like all the kids). The other things on the site are far weirder, not sure whether I would really want to see monks' corpses ripped apart by vultures or the festering debris of Hurricane Katrina (though that was a tourist place, so to not visit it out of a sense of propriety is almost like wiping it off the map, surely).
The experiences of death tell you as much about a place as do big anniversaries, and it seems weird that the experience of travelling should be circumscribed by mostly 'happy' emotions. The permanent exhibition in Berlin's Jewish Museum still makes me feel pretty ill, which is the intention. There are hundreds of cast iron faces, resembling giant locks almost, covering the floor of a room that is slanted so it gets narrower and narrower with a single very thin shaft of light coming through a single skylight at the end of it. When you walk across the faces, as you are encouraged to do, it makes a horrendous clanking noise, which is unbearable. I didn't want to see Auschwitz and felt much safer in the clean educational confines of the museum, but it doesn't seem pathological that people would be interested in other actual sites of death that are less culturally prominent but still significant given that people died on them. Maybe it's a substitute for exploration travel, which only a few ever did anyway. Get your own survival tale, survival in the Trisha sense, by vicariously living through someone else's pain.
... I've started writing my first essay for my penultimate course. It's so painful, I really feel like my brain is freeze-dried coffee granules, and I'm painstakingly shaking and pouring the last bits almost congealed at the bottom of the jar, knowing full well that I will have a properly depressing cup of something that looks like dirty water at the end of it. Errrm. This isn't because it's especially difficult or anything, it's mostly because sociology essays are incredibly boring. I wish I was studying poetry, identifying zeugmas, and meters, and well, nice things like that.
