| Jul092009 | Disneyland, California |
You know, Southern California ain’t so bad. I spent an enjoyable July 4th weekend down there with the in-laws (they are technically my girlfriend’s family and not my in-laws but it’s just so much easier to say that and I don’t think it is a big deal but everybody else on Earth gets weirded out by the premature connotations of, gasp, marriage).
Despite several nitpicks about the lifestyle there—driving at least 10 miles for anything, the amount of resources needed to turn desert into suburbia, sleeping at night under the constant threat of El Cupacabra—I think it’s a great part of the world (and her parent’s house is so huge that I can raise my pulse just by walking to my bedroom).
I did not ride the teacups because I did not feel like a beautiful princess that day.
I spent the Friday at Disneyland being shown around by my Disneyland veteran of a girlfriend. I expected a shitty theme park. When I was in Tokyo and someone suggested Disneyland, I rolled my eyes and laughed in the face of their childish hope and naiveté. But it turns out there’s a reason why Disney makes the big bucks: their theme parks are actually good. Plenty of chances to get cool, actual restaurants with table service, food that hasn’t been deep fried, rides that are sufficiently scary without being vomit-inducing, the exact right amount of kitsch… I could go on but, suffice to say, they run a pretty tight operation over there.
The crowning glory is, of course, the FastPass system. You walk over to a more popular ride and print out a receipt. This tells you that you can come back in a few hours and have virtually zero wait to get on a ride. This guarantees that you’ll get on at least one of the popular rides during your visit and you’ll spend a few hours milling around and spending money on other things. This is good if you, like me, hate queuing for hours with noisy children.
At this point in my blog post, I realize I’m a 24-year-old man extolling the virtues of a theme park owned and operated by the Walt Disney Corporation but the hell with it. This place specializes in making sure that adults and older kids can have fun whilst the children indulge their cartoon fantasies. They’ve struck a great balance to ensure that everyone can have a good day out. (Also, they make the perfect chili dog: it captures that coke-in-glass-bottles, 50′s diner, food-in-a-basket kind of nostalgia and tastes great.)
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