The best/quirky/interesting foreign language idioms.

[stpauler]

I found an old mix tape I made in high school (about 15 years ago) and was listening to it recently. It’s a bit of a diary in a way which shows my tastes and how they’ve changed in the recent years. Up comes a song by french singer Johnny Hallyday called “Le Mirador”. I sang along like I knew the words the whole time and in some parts, just the phonetics as the words were lost on me. I searched and found the lyrics and got tripped up when I tried to translate them. One of the verses stated:
C’est pas le Pérou
Mais faut rêver
Which translated to “It’s not Peru, but one has to dream…” I was sure there was a mistake or something I was missing but then I found this website which stated:

In the eighteenth century, in France, the name of Peru rang with a golden echo. And an expression was then born: Ce n’est pas le Perou, which is used when something is not as rich and extraordinary as its legendary name suggests. Well, Le Perou n’est pas le Perou. It never was, at least for the majority of its inhabitants, that fabulous country of legends and fictions but rather an artificial gathering of men from different languages, customs, and traditions whose only common denominator was having been condemned by history to live together without knowing or loving one another.

For some reason, that really tickled my brain and I would love to read some more.