Thursday - Disneyland Paris
I’m writing this on the TGV from Disneyland Paris to Lille, where we will catch the Eurostar to London. Yesterday we went to the Disney Studios Paris, which is similar to MGM Studios at Disney World. Both Bobbi and I had heard bad things about the park so we were expecting the worst. We were pleasantly surprised.
We started the day off by watching Moteurs…Action, which is a stunt show with cars. They do really cool stuff with cars…lots of burn outs and crazy driving. It is a lot of fun to watch. The show originated at Disney Studios Paris, but was brought to MGM Studios at Disney World 2 summers ago because of its popularity. The show was just as fun to watch as the MGM Studios version, but a little harder to follow, as the show is hosted “live” by some “reporters”. The show is spoken in both English and French, alternating. One of the reporters spoke French, the other spoke English. They would tag team and I thought they did a good job with the “hand offs.” For example, when the French person was done speaking, the English person would say “That’s right….” and go on an repeat what the French person just said in English.
The language makeup at Disneyland Paris is VERY interesting. I would say that around 30% of the visitors speak French, another 30% speak, 10% Italian, 10% Spanish, 10% German and 10% other. EVERYTHING is in English and French. Many of the signs and attraction names are in English first and then French, which surprised me. The same goes for the menus. In attractions with TV monitors, they have 3 different video monitors, with the middle monitor containing the video and spoken audio (sometimes French, sometimes English) and then they would have captioning in 6 different languages on the TV monitors to the side.
Our favorite thing at the Disney Studios was Animagique, which was a really cool . It was a live action, musical show with Disney characters. The show starred Donald and Mickey. Donald spoke English and Mickey spoke French. It was really cute. Half the songs were in English and the other half in French. The show used a lot of blacklighting and reminded me of “Voyage of the Little Mermaid” at Disneyworld…only better.
They are building a Tower of Terror at Disney Studios as well. From the outside, it looks like a carbon copy of the one at California Adventure! They also have Aerosmith’s Rockin Roller Coaster which is nearly identical to the one at MGM Studios.
(Bobbi's Comments: One thing - half of the park - literally - was walled up because there was so much construction. Two new attractions will open this June, and of course, Tower of Terror, that Grant mentioned.)
We were able to do everything in the park in 6 hours, then we headed over to Disneyland and did some of our favorites for a 2nd time (Haunted Mansion, Pirates and Thunder Mountain). One really cool thing about Disneyland here is that they have lots of sit-down restaurants. At 6PM I was able to make a reservation at Walt's, an American Restaurant, for 8:00pm. (which is when the park closed). The food was very good (definitely American style) but the service was just as French as ever. For example, it took 20 minutes after we sat down before we ever saw the waiter, and a 3 course dinner took 2 hours! It didn’t bother us. We were seated at a window overlooking one of the streets on Main Street.
After that, we headed back to the hotel and packed!
(Bobbi's Note: To me, the one thing that reminded me the most that we were not in America was the armed guards patrolling the bus stops with machine guns.)
That’s all for now.
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