Diss-NAY-lahn

Haunted Mansion disneyland
Originally uploaded by La Page Parisienne.

I suppose I have been avoiding it since my arrival in France because after all, I'm in Paris, why would I do something I have been doing since I was a kid in SoCal? It always annoys me when people come all the way to Paris and never set foot in the Louvre but head straight to Disneyland Paris. But this was a great time to go. In October, the weather was still good, not too hot and not too cold. And most of the tourists were gone, save for the Euro tourists, we saw lots of Brits, a few Spaniards and Italians, but mostly just French. (So much for David Letterman's joke about Eurodisney being empty). Because the tourists were gone, we barely waited in line for longer than twenty minutes, which is unheard of in high season. The longest we waited was 30 minutes for Thunder Mountain. And the RER is super convenient. Not only were we able to buy our passes at Auber, thereby bypassing the long queue at the entrance, but the train dropped us off in only 35 minutes about 100 feet from the park. Ok so we won't go every week but still we had a good time.

The animatronic technology, I have to say, is starting to look a bit dorky though. I'm not sure how they can progress technologically speaking, but I think eventually things like Pirates of the Carribean and Snow White's Scary Adventures will look a little obsolete. Otherwise, Parc Disneyland is basically an exact yet smaller replica of the one in Anaheim, with the exception of Space Mountain where, instead of the mod sixties look that has begun to have its own retro charm, they appropriately did a Jules Verne theme, in which the beginning of the ride is like shooting out of a cannon. Also, the Phantom Manor doesn't have the New Orleans theme. Is this supposed to be Norman Bates' house?