BaroqueW

Just back from Disneyland, and I couldn’t help but realize that Disneyland is no paradise. “Just” is to take loosely, I tend to delay my articles quite a lot. I have in my stash an article beginning by “I just came back from…” and it’s 10 month old. I have a good hope to post it at the next occurrence of what I wanted to write about (and next time I witness it of course).

Please use real money when visiting Disney Land

Disneyland is very well organized. I read somewhere that Walt Disney insisted himself that two garbage bins should never be spaced of more than X minutes, where X minutes is enough to eat a hot dog (the value of X probably changes whether you live in the States or in Japan). But Disneyland is also very well organized to make you sure your stay will never be 100% complete or perfect. No matter how well organized (and yes we are) or how early you arrive and late you leave (and yes we did arrive early and live late) or how long you stay (and yes we did stay three days), you cannot do everything. Some rides are of course closed, for maintenance – end of June, perfect time for maintenance really – or for temporary repairs (without really spending our days monitoring I would say that at least two major rides break per day (Space Mountain, Thunder Mesa’s mine ride, etc.)).

To make things faster, Disney park now offers Fast Pass tickets which allow you to skip the queue for some rides, provided that you registered for them earlier during the day (one active registration at a time). But if you do that, you miss all of the fun of queueing and shuffling your feet for ages! Or at least that must be what the people working in Disney think, since all the ones from the Disney Studio Park were closed during the two days we visited it. Closed from the first hour, or running out of tickets within the first hour. Of course, seeing how little rides there are in that park, if you don’t queue, you will do them all in one day, over and over again and we don’t want that, do we? Further strategy to make you wait longer is known (from now on) as the “empty car” strategy. Let’s say you have a train-like ride, then only fill in the first cars of the train, not all. No matter what. This way, you ensure quality waiting for your visitors.

It’s also organized for your shopping pleasure. One hour before closing, the rides start closing their lines and the restaurants bounce you. Only option, going home, or visiting the numerous shops, of course posted near the exit so that you’re sure you won’t miss them.

Goofy Zombie

Now, imagine a park full of zombies moving slowly with awkward movements and the mouth drooling with blood. That’s the dream vision Disney  tried to enforce during my visit, and I for some reason compliantly strived for. Step one, run everywhere for the first day, while this temporarily put me away from my first goal, it definitely helped for days #2 and #3 where I could barely walk, feeling my heel had been replace by a wooden stub. For the gorier part of my dream, I will only need one contraption: an ice cream. Emphasize on “ice”. Open said ice cream, jump on it to quench your thirst and fight the heat, and get your lips, both, and your tongue, both, glued to it by the cold. Like an idiot, pull on it, request help from your buddies, but too late. Check: you now have a painful pair of legs, a bloody mouth and you are roaming aimlessly between Fantasyland and Frontierland with only indecision on your face, hesitating between some junk food restaurant and whatever ride you could find that will not have you queue 55 minutes before getting to enjoy the 1 minute ride.

But not all is bad. The Stunt show spectacular in the Studios park is quite enjoyable. Provided you do see it twice. Yes, twice. Everything goes very vast (can’t really do stunts in slow motion in real life). And those devious mice worshippers actually trick you into looking somewhere else when cool stuff happens. With videos, or by setting up decoys, you always end up missing the super fancy shit. It’s a bit hard to understand why they would spend cars and motorbikes flying altogether amidst balls of fire while you’re looking somewhere else. “What just happened?” is not really a nice compliment for the crowd to utter after your finale…

Finally, I was looking forward to answer the online survey to which I agreed when checking out, but well… the email sends me to a webpage that is redirected all the time to some vague error page, and of course the email address from which said email was sent is not read by anyone (as I was informed by yet another automatic reply). I guess they will have to find their way to my page to know what I think about them (by the way, look out for my article on how to setup your own Disney hotel soon on this blog!)