Disneyland Pour Us

Disneyland Paris, Paris, France

Sadly, we are left without any photos from our stop at le happiest place on Earth, so we're again using photos from the internet to make our point...and we do have one.

As Southern Californianers, we, like everyone else (right?), owned Disneyland Season passes the year before we left for Europe. Our favorite time of year to visit was at Christmas time, and we weren't about to let a trip to Europe stand in our way!

So with Germany, Austria, and Scandinavia under our belt, it was time to visit the capitol of Europe: Disneyland Paris. We were excited to see how the park would translate overseas to an audience that would likely be less enchanted by castles and un-familiar with "Main Street USA."

Dear friends and readers and internet searchers: This is a deviation from our usual type of posts, and it's more for the benefit of any people considering going to Disneyland Paris. So it might be overly detailed and "reviewy" (read: boring).

The park was easily accessed by train, which made it feel a little commonplace being just a stop on the Metro line instead of a "destination." After our change of itinerary in Strassburg, our visit to the park was en route to our next stop in Paris, which meant that we hit the park with all our (4!) bags with us. (BEST TIP: The park has a convenient luggage hold right by the entrance, and it's cheaper than the luggage lockers at the train station). Our first impression walking into the park was that it was like Anaheim's Disneyland placed on twice as much land. The park immediately feels bigger. Not necessarily better, just sprawling with more land than they were sure to do with.  It was kind of like walking through twilight zone Disneyland -- overall it looked the same but all the proportions were off and details were different.

Main St., USA is more of a Boulevard, seemingly wide enough to be a divided road, and lit with street lamps themed for each Disney princess.  There's less emphasis on Main St and more on USA: the all-American decorations are complete with giant drawings of Ellis Island and the beautiful Statue of Liberty (a gift from France to America, don't you forget it!). The street also had covered arcades on each side, accommodating the not so Californian weather. The parks seem to have been built by a French team whose task was to rebuild Disneyland in France based on photos and short park visits. Some things feel identical and some just feel like French interpretations of Americana, like Casey's Corner, a 20's baseball themed cafe with hot dogs, milkshakes, coffee and BEER! Also, the layout of the park is nearly identical to Anaheim's which made navigating very simple and made everything feel even more bizarro-Disney.

The centerpiece of the park, like in California, is Sleeping Beauty's castle. We'd read that they put a lot of work into making this castle more interactive and larger than the American version, maybe to keep the castle -overloaded French interested. It was one of our favorite parts of the park, with a second story and balconies, and a cave below with an animatronic sleeping dragon that moves just enough to keep the kids guessing. We actually visited the castle to escape a quick downpour, so imagine here some beautiful photos of the castle spotlit in the rain.

The other nice decor surprise in Adventureland. Since the park is newer, they were able to incorporate an Aladdin section of "town" into this area, and it has the prettiest architecture of both parks, in our opinion. But, the rest of Adventureland was pretty much the same feel as California's park.

Tomorrowland, called Discoveryland, was the least copycat area, with a very foreign feeling Jules Vern vision of the future with jagged looking neon/pastel/metallic windswept space rocks jutting out making for 

That's space mountain. Weird, right?

futuristically narrow walkways in places. Space Mountain: Mission 2, was also totally re-imagined and, we'd say, better than its California counterpart. The ride starts with the car sitting still almost vertically on a track, laying you on your back as you hear a countdown to launch which starts the ride off at full speed amongst a blur of lights. The ride is a full speed roller coaster in the dark with a proper loop de loop thrown in. 

Frontierland was so sprawling, it actually felt like a frontier. It looked very similar to Anaheim, but with an extra mountain range and an easier to access island. Big Thunder mountain was our first ride of the day. For a ride built in the 80's they did an amazing job aging the decorations. We had plenty of time to admire the aged ironworks because the with the line management, one line cleared out, while ours stood still. We, like good Americans, scoffed that this would never happen in California. But the ride itself was also longer —and more thrilling— than the one at Disneyland.

All around, the roller coasters were better in Paris, and most of the non-roller coaster adventure rides had been transformed into roller coasters. The Indiana Jones ride was a full roller coaster using a mining cart theme from the movie. The ride is called Indiana Jones et le temple du Peril.  At the second park, called Walt Disney Studios, there's a ride designed by Aerosmith with a matching soundtrack called Rockin' Roller Coaster avec Aerosmith. The ride feels like space mountain, but with big hair and 80's appropriate colors. David got a big kick out of the staging area for the line because it looks like a no frills lobby for a record company, complete with bored interns paging people on the intercom.

One of our favorite pics
 that was lost.
Imagine this is David.

Eating in Disneyland Paris is a very expensive proposition, with a slice of pizza costing around $10. So we got creative and left the park to visit the adjacent metro station's French version of 7-11, Huit a Huit. We had a lot of equally cheap company shopping for lunch. Two sandwiches, a can of Pringles, and a bottle of wine later, we sat down to watch WD Studio's stunt car show Moteurs, conducted half in English, half in French. It was tres fun, but our favorite show was Cinémagique with Martin Short. No, not live. Probably the best thing that's unique to Disneyland Paris.

The park didn't disappoint in the Christmas spirit department, either. Mickey and the whole gang got together to speak some French and sing some Christmas carols. And to introduce us to....Duffy! Who is Duffy, you might ask? Apparently it's Mickey's teddy bear that he forgot to tell us about 'til this year. And it's available at the gift shop. Take that, Build-A-Bear! Duffy was all over the park, maybe making up for all that lost time.  Winnie the Pooh did not attend the Christmas parade, as he was off sulking that his 15 minutes of bear fame were up.

Best "Huh"s:
- Although the Haunted Mansion was almost identical to the California version, it ended with a random animatronic Wild West turn, with gun slinging cowboys.