Aug 01, 2006 05:07 PM
3976 Views
Firstly, I would like to add that we had visited Disneyland in Anaheim, near L.A. in California. My wife and son had certain basic expectations. However, I warned them not to expect the same quality as we were going to the one in France. I should have bought a lottery ticket at the same time: I would have become rich. The shuttle bus Anyway, we arrive by train (Eurostar from London), take a shuttle bus to the hotel (outside the park), and dump our stuff in the hotel, and get ready for the shuttle to go back to the park. So far, so good. The receptionist gave me a paper with the shuttle timings on it but said it would be better if we arrived near the hotel gates with 10 mts to spare. That’s something we do by habit anyway. The gaps between the shuttle buses are about 1 hour or more and none operate during the lunch hour (which is actually a couple of hours in France). So, anyway, we arrive at the gates with 15 mts to spare, and find the place crawling with kids and adults. Everyone was early. The bus arrived almost the next instant, and everyone got aboard within the next few minutes. The driver looks around, sees no one else waiting, and leaves with 10 mts to spare! Hmmm…. Interesting. Walt Disney Studios We take a 3 day park hopper tickets ( for Walt Disney studios and the Disneyland park), and decide to start with the studios. Let me be short and not bore you with many details Many rides closed, people standing in queues and suddenly they make an announcement saying it is closed temporarily for repairs: could take 1 minute, could take 1 day (they actually announce it as such!). People wait a while then move out. Suddenly they announce it is open again and people go stampeding back! We go into a demonstration of how cartoons are made. We stand in line and everybody walks in. Before even people have sat down, the presenter says it is going to be in French ( what a surprise!) . He then goes on to say that for other languages, we could use the headphones but we would have to plug them into the right socket for the right language. But before even we could sit down, the lights go out and the presentation starts off in French! And for the next 35 minutes, I kept hearing my son who complained that he didn’t understand anything. Grrrrrrr Towards the end of the day, around 5 pm, many people started shutting down the rides and stalls. I approached a staff member and asked her about it as the closing time was 6 pm. She replied saying, “Well, earlier, the hours were 10 to 5 and then they changed it to 10 to 6, and we have only one shift, so we just shut down earlier!.” Hmm. Interesting. The French obsession with the 35 hour week is obviously in force in Disneyland as well. The next day in the main Disneyland park was not much better. The same old confusion of rides not working and starting again, and then stopping, continued with the main attractions: space mountain2, and on Indiana Jones. It was ridiculous. My son and I took some fast passes. My son later observed, “Paapa, this should be called ‘slow pass’ and not ‘fast pass’. The normal queues were moving faster than the fast pass. Pathetic organisation and bad queue control. Absolute mayhem. I was taking photographs in some of the queues for the roller coasters when we were close to them. The staff almost strangled me. I mentioned this to a manager, saying, even if they cannot speak politely, which, apparently, was asking for too much, at the very least they could have put up notices saying photography was not allowed in certain areas. There were many such incidents as the ones listed above and I don’t want to increase my pain by going through all of them here. Suffice to say that we experienced none of the “Disney magic”. Our trip was aptly summarised by our 7 year old in two instances: On the way back, he was chatting with some of the English kids who had been to Disneyland and they were complaining of their bad experiences, and my son replies, “You know it is a backward country, so it is normal.” At the passport check at the station, the UK authorities asked us where had we been and when we had told them, they asked if it was as good as the ones in the US, and my son replied, “This one is boring, and totally different.” I had to drag him away before he explained many of the gory details!
