The blond effect

(Feminists if you want to attack me please note that this post is completely "second degré" as we say in French (= ironic) and that nothing is against the blonds)

After more than three months of almost continuous sunshine in SE Asia my hair is much more blond than when I left and the change is not only to my hair. What follows is a description of the blond effect (the theory comes from a famous philospher named A.) Contrary to what many people think this is not limited to women (although statistics show that the effect is much more present with women) because this is a concept. The blond effect is like the candy kiss cool in France there are two effects in one name.

The first effect is the feeling to be quite dumb (being completely dumb without knowing it is called the "golden blond effect"). I really felt it as soon as I arrived in Japan as I got lost 10 times per day in Tokyo, I kept coming back on my steps and I was usually unable to find by myself what I was looking for. The other moment I felt really stupid is when I was asking to Japanese where is XX in Japanese (this sentence is really easy, it is XX wa doko desu ka) and that they were starting to talk for 2 mns and obviously I did not get a word of what they were saying so I was just smiling and pretending I understood (and I had to ask again 100 meters further).
Another instance is when I did not take my umbrella one morning whereas all Japanese people had theirs and later on that day I had to buy one to protect myself from the rain or the day after when I took mine and no one did I decided to keep it and the sun came so I had to carry it all day for nothing. Finally the top is probably when I was trying to find places to eat and if there were no pictures and if even the figures were in kanji (one of the three Japanese alphabets) I knew I simply could not eat there.

The second effect is that people stare a lot at you (and usually in a positive way). Well this was the case in Japan and somehow maybe even more than in SE Asia. People do nt twave at you but it is sometimes obvious people are talking about you (when you hear the word gaijin), pointing at you or like these men in Shimosuwa that thought I was cool simply because I was blond and I had a beard. There are also these two young girls who started to picture me as if I was an object in Shibuya. The attention is nice but feelign like an object is definitively not my cup of tea.

Anyway this is to say that I understood a lot about why it is also difficult to be blond and that I will probably do less jokes about blonds in the future (maybe...)