"Go West..." ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif)
leenercat posted and interesting description of
her first impressions of the West. Many of these remind me of my own...
My first exposure to the West happened when I lived in France, for a period of 1.5 years, between 1991-92. I later
made the big mistake of extrapolating about USA based on what I saw and experienced in France. One of the first
things that hit me at the Charles de Gaule airport was not the abundance of consumer products (we watched TV
and knew what to expect), but the amazing cleanness and almost religious shine of everything around us. People
who smiled to you for no reason, and excused themselves over every triviality. Everything clean and polite, everything
beautiful, everything tasteful. Then came our shock of gastronomic standards. In France, everything tastes good.
Including McDonalds food. Even junk food. You buy a bottle of wine for the equivalent of $2, and while it's not
the finest, it's pretty good. At some point my father decided to "break us" into
real French food, and
made us try raw oysters. The first try was absolutely disgusting -- the "treat" looked like mucus from one's nose.
The second try actually tasted not bad. And by the third one we were consuming oysters with the
mania of true quiche eating surrender monkeys! It took us somewhat longer to get used to the fart-smelling cheeses...
Once our taste buds well entertained and our stomachs full, we started looking around us. All kinds of polite people,
however by now we started noticing all kinds of things that were inconceivable for us: homeless people, punks,
girls whose buttocks vibrated visibly from under <20cm long skirts, young couples making out passionately at every corner,
central Africans with their exotic dresses and terrifying-looking piercings and ear-holes, people of every color and
style...and of course the French bourgeois, who inhabited our well kept and artistically decorated apartment building.
It really felt like we landed on the Moon. In the good sense...however some things did either bother us (punks, homeless,
smoking 14 year old girls) or tremendously confuse/amuse us (gratuicious expression of public sexuality, vibrating buttocks, 60 year old women dressed like sex bombs, people of color and culture that was very different from ours, Centre George Pompidou, Tour Eiffel). Not that I had never seen people of other races before arriving
to Paris, however it was so rare, that seeing an African or an Asian for me was as sensational as seeing an
extraterrestrial: I just had this terrible urge to stare at them, observe their amazingly non-white color, the shape
of their lips, noses, eyes, hair (!!). Just as you would observe an extraterrestrial.
As far as architecture and city planning was concerned, we couldn't get enough of that cleanness, of that taste in every
brick of every house. The apartment where we lived was a very comfortable 2bedroom, with many what we at the time considered
exotic appliances, and a view onto a beautiful 19th century chateau set in a beautiful forest. Paris was simply not
understandable to us: crazy structures and buildings on the background of 19th century architecture. Oh yes, my father,
a big aficionado of fine arts, made a habit of dragging us to Louvre and Musee d'Orsay
and other museums and galleries every weekend, thoroughly boring the hell out of me and my 13 year old sister..
Finally we started looking at ourselves. Our clothes were chosen not based on the criteria of taste, but on the criteria of
bare availability. Grey, black, brown. We felt like some mamoth-fur-covered Neanderthals in this crowd of cheerfully colored folks. So we organized a trip to one of the central stores of
C&A, where
we completely changed our appearance within an hour or so. We breathed in relief, and went on to live for another 1.5 years
in one of the most beautiful cities of the world, making friends among French, Arabs, Indonesians, Portuguese, Africans and yes,
even Armenians.
amused
