Seeing SARS

My walk to the Métro on my way home takes me up the Champs Elysées, so as you can imagine I see a few tourists. Usually they're just doing goofy stuff like trying to take photos that won't POSSIBLY work (like a shot of the Arc de Triomphe with the sun in front of them whilst standing in the middle of eight lanes of traffic, or a shot of the Louis Vuitton store (why?) 100m away with flash in the dark). But yesterday I saw something that made me stop in my tracks.

It was a young, Japanese chap walking down the road with his mate, whilst wearing a surgical mask.

Instantly I was taken back to my experience of SARS in Singapore a couple of years ago, and the attendant madness that went with it. I was taken to a world where it was quite unusual to see a Chinese person WITHOUT a mask, and where places liek the zoo and the Bird Park were pretty much deserted. I was back in a world where I had to have my temperature taken three times a week, where there was thermal imaging equipment checking you as you entered the airport, and where taxi drivers had to post their temperature readings on their dashboards twice a day. Put simply, I was back in a world of madness.

The explanation was a little less creepy - and actually quite sensible. Apparently it's quite common for Japanese people to don a mask if they get a cold, to stop it spreading. As I'm suffering from a bit of a cold myself today that I expect I caught from someone I was squashed up against on the Métro, that seems quite a good idea right now.