Disneyland Paris

Lily, the kids' babysitter works at Disneyland. And ever since she started babysitting for them, she has wanted to treat our family to a day there. So, yesterday we headed out early in the morning for the RER train to Marnee-la-Vallee, where the Disney parks are located. Forgetting that it was Sunday, we were frustrated to find that most of the ticket counters in the Nation station were closed, and it took an additional 45 minutes to find our way to an open ticket counter to buy the train tickets (only to then find that all the turnstiles were stuck in the open position and were not checking tickets!).

We arrived in the Disney complex around 10:15 with an hour to spend in Disney Village before our rendez-vous with Lily. Disney Village is a street of shops and restaurants outside of the park itself, but still largely controlled by Disney. The kids spent some time in the Disney shop trying to narrow down the many attractive items to choose one souvenier to buy later in the day. We ate an early picnic lunch we had brought along with us, and met up with Lily, and went into Disneyland.

We experienced the day on two levels - the second of which may be hard to explain, but I'll try.

The first was the level of the kids. Ella and Jonah had an absolutely magical day at Disney. I might have mentioned that Jonah is as big a fan of the Princesses that ever was, and Ella is still just young enough to buy into the magic. They got to meet Cinderella and Snow White. After spending the morning thinking about what he would say to the princesses, Jonah was so blown away by the actual moment of meeting them that he was speechless. C and SW signed the kids princess books, gave them kisses, posed for photos, and promised a special wave during the parade. We spent a lot of the morning in Fantasyland. We rode Snow White and Pinocchio - both of which Ella loved, but which bothered Jonah a little bit. Jonah is not scared of the motion of the rides or the darkness, but he objects morally and intensely to the existence of "bad guys" who figure prominantly in these rides. Fortunately, most of the other rides were much more pacifist in nature. Jonah *loved* it's a small world, and insisted on riding it twice, ditto for the carousel. They both loved Buzz Lightyears Laser blast, the Lion King show, Peter Pan's flight, Pirates of the Carribean, the parade (where many princesses and characters waved and winked), and Autopia (where you drive mini cars on a race track - Ella was the driver for her and Abe, Jonah helped steer our car - there's a raised track down the middle, so you can't go too wrong). Ella went on and loved a few of the higher thrill rides like the haunted house and Big Thunder Mountain rollercoaster. On the rollercoaster, she made a big show about how she wasn't scared, while I made a big show about how I was. About 20 seconds into the ride, she turned to me and screamed, "actually, I am scared," and about 10 seconds later yelled, "Do they even know how dangerous this is?" If the park hadn't been about to close, she would have loved to go again. One funny moment came when in the middle of dinner, in the middle of this wonderful Disney day, Ella suddenly asked, "When I'm a grandma, will you be dead?" Not sure where that came from! At the end of the day, the kids picked out their souveniers (a Tinkerbell piggy bank for Ella and a Princess stamping kit for Jonah), before we all collapsed onto the train back to Paris at the end of the day. So, on the level of the kids, the day was an enormous success.

The other level on which we experienced the day was as a bizarre confrontation of two cultures -American and French (or even broadly, European). It doesn't get much more American than Disney, and I can sometimes see how Disney may represent for others what is superficial and phoney about American culture. But, at Disneyland Paris, all the best parts (at least to our eyes) were the American influence. For the rest, taken out of the context of the things we have learned to love about French life (the long leisurely meals, the deep human connectedness, the appreciation for art and things that are old and beautiful), all that is left are the less appealing aspects of French culture (the bureaucratic single-mindedness of the employees, the arbitrary rules, and the lack of a customer service ethic). Throughout the day, both literal and figurative roadblocks were put up in our way, making us feel from time to time as though we were on a never ending and futile quest to obtain cartes de sejour in the midst of the happiest place on earth. The Disney "castmember" who told us that she was going to put up a rope to end the line to meet the princesses in front of us (but who was fortunately overruled by her supervisor) reminded us of employees at the Marie who would only accept a birth certificate translation from a particular translator (and another employee on another day who thought our translation was just fine). The surly waiter who rolled his eyes at us when we told him that we didn't want an apperatif, seemed quite out of place at Annette's Diner. The ticket taker who sighed in annoyance when we showed up 5 minutes before the Lion King show instead of 15 as was printed on the ticket, didn't exactly add to the Disney magic. Whereas the American answer to "the Princesses are his favorite character," would have been "Which princess do you like the best?" instead, one cast member responded, "Yes, the Princesses have been very successful for Disney."

Who knows. Maybe we just had some bad luck with tired employees who were having a rough day. Maybe in our nostalgia for American culture, small slights seemed worse than they should have. Or maybe an American icon (person?) set down in the middle of France will always be a little bit out of place. In any event, the kids had fun, which is what really counts for a day at Disney.