10-31

It's the finest day of the year, and I'm traveling.  My body clock continues to be mis-working, because even though our plan was to get up at seven to make the seven-thirty train two blocks away, by six-thirty I was awake and showered.  Jeff's philosophy is that it's better to be early than late, so we packed up our stuff and headed out.  I wanted to thank the staff here, but they looked at me like I was way out of line, so I have yet to understand the European way of doing things.  I had packed an apple and a Coke Zero in my backpack, and we took the Tube one last time (I asked a bloke if I could sit down beside him and he blinked and said, "Wha?  Of course."), getting off at King's Cross, then lining up to go through passport control.  We are required to take all the things out of our pockets and put our belongings in trays, which go through detectors, and I did so . . . only to wait an inordinate amount of time waiting for my stuff to come through.  

Well, when it did, I found a puddle inside the tray: the Coke Zero had seemingly leaked and/or exploded inside the backpack.  This was unfortunate and did not please me, despite what you would guess.  I carried my more-than-dripping backpack to the nearest trash can and emptied it as best I could into it.  A row or two away, an employee was cleaning up the floor where someone had dropped their coffee cup, and when I asked her for some paper towels, Jeff looked at me like I had decided to start beefing my stroganoff there in the terminal.  That also did not please me.  

Eventually, I made it through customs and found a restroom where I could try to clean out my backpack.  They had no paper towels there (which again, unfortunate), but I held the bag open in front of the air hand dryers over and over again as their five second cycles ended and started again.  Yippee.

Finally, I thought I had it dry enough, but after we stood to get on the train to Paris, I noticed yet another unsightly puddle where my bag had sat.  Happy Halloween.

Now we're leaving England and on our way to Paris.  The celebrity of this visit, sleeping next to Emily, is Battlestar Galactica's Katee Sackhoff.  I've never liked her or found her very attractive, but this look-alike is nice.

The ride was uneventful, but when we got to Paris rail station, I didn't know how to do things, and had a bit of an incident because of it.  So, in England they have these things called Oyster cards, where you put money on a card, and swipe the card going into and out of the Underground stations (it also works on the big double-decker buses too).  It is pretty brilliant, and supremely useful.  In Paris, you have to buy your ticket from a little kiosk, then feed that ticket (about the size of a movie stub back in the day) into a machine that eats it and spits it out at the top.  Emily explained it to me, but when we were going through a checkpoint, I expected the ticket to come out where I'd inserted it, not at the top, so while I looked for it, the five or six seconds they give you to get through the gate were counting down, so when I tried to go through, the doors closed on me.  Literally, I was stuck in there, with my shoulder, arm, and backpack on one side of the entrance and the rest of me on the other.

The offending ticket.

Now, thank God Jeff and Emily were there with me, because Jeff used his hands to pry the doors open again, while Emily pulled my backpack inside, or I would've been stuck there, calling for help in a language nobody around me understood.  It bothered me for, oh, the next hour, thinking about it.  And now it's bothered me again . . . just like those damned self-closing doors in Cloud City bothered me as a little kid, wondering what would happen if you waited just a second too long stepping through one of them.  Fudge, now I'm thinking of old people or fat people or little kids going through, not knowing you have a very short time limit to get through the gates, and getting stuck, caught, or smashed in there like a mouse in a trap.  Shudder.

Eventually, we took a subterranean train to take us to Chessy, which I believe was the city Disneyland is in.  It went fast, up and down, underground and over it.  I've been on more trains this week than I have my whole life leading up to this trip.  An old beggar lady (she might have been a nun, I'm not judging) approached me on the train for a hand-out, and it was the first time that had happened this trip.  I would be approached twice more on that same train (once by a child, once by a twenty-something kid), but I find it odd that there were only beggars in Paris, of all the places we went (there were bullshit artists in Venice, but that ain't the same thing).

We were staying in the Hotel New York, which Jeff had stayed in before and said I would like because it had--get this--a Marvel Comics theme.  And man, it was not subtle.  There were paintings everywhere, decor, memorabilia, and life-sized statues of Iron Man (three inside and one outside).  

We had to go through Security to get in the building (which was unusual), and our room was on the Captain America floor, with a huge mural outside the elevator doors (the floor above us was dedicated to Thor). 

This ain't a great picture (or even good), but the soap was molded into the shape of the Avengers logo.

There are two Disney parks, just like in Anaheim, and we had those tickets where you could go to either one.  They had been there a bunch of times, so the only thing they hadn't been on were the two Marvel rides, built since their last visit.

Before we went into the park, Jeff wanted to eat (pretty much the default mode for him), and proposed we go to the big steakhouse beside the park.  But I was worried about the prices, and Jeff said, "Don't worry, I got it."  That was super generous, in a week of unbelievable generosity, but man, when I saw the prices . . . I felt dirty about it.  I'm talking: putting on your big sister's bra and prancing around in front of her mirror-level dirty.*  This effing place was so expensive that when I asked for ketchup, they provided me with a little personal two Euro bottle, that was just for me.

The Disney parks were open, and the crowds were very, very large, which (it turned out) was due to it being a fall break at many schools in the European Union, and also Halloween Day.  When leaving London and entering Paris, I had waved at and/or congratulated anyone I saw wearing a costume, but by the time we'd walked through the strip mall of Disney shops outside the parks, I had stopped doing so--there were just too many.

I have to tip my hat to the thousands of European souls that liked Halloween enough to go somewhere to collectively celebrate it, but it did make for a lot of congestion, especially trying to get into the park's gates, and anywhere there were rides.  We went into Disneyland, and headed toward Phantom Manor, and just before we got there, a huge spider was crossing the cobblestone sidewalk, and the attendees were shrieking and pointing at it.  It was not quite tarantula-sized, but it was bigger than any spider I've run into outside of the desert.  I took it as a cool Halloween omen . . . until Jeff said that somebody was bound to stomp on it.

We made our way to the Phantom Manor, where the line was insanely long (understandably so, considering the date).  But that's what we were there for.

I had wanted to see Phantom Manor for years, and I had plenty of time to wait, as the line snaked all around the property, and we watched those with the new Fastpass-equivalents bypass all of us to go on ahead (this was a delightful scam wherein those willing to pay nine Euros FOR EACH RIDE could skip the line and enter on the other side, when, honestly, part of going to parks like this is standing in the line . . . heck, it may be an integral part).  It's very similar to Disneyland's The Haunted Mansion, but all in French--just like all the rides there--but with a more morbid, actively scary theme to it.

Basically, Phantom Manor has a story to it, about a beautiful young woman named Melanie, whose evil father (I didn't realize he was the father on the ride, I just figured he was basically me) keeps her from her interested male suitors, and locks her away in a haunted house until she gives in to despair and essentially becomes a ghost.  The Phantom is a very coolly-designed ghost that shows up multiple times during the ride, and was initially voiced by Vincent Price, only to have all that dropped when French officials insisted the dialogue be in French instead of English.

A couple of years ago, however, they came up with a way to have their gâteau and eat it too by having one line in English, followed by one line in French, and they restored Vincent Price's narration, at least in part.

It has a lot of the Anaheim park's charming characters, like the singing busts and Madame Leota, but at the beginning, you get this awesome scene of the broken-hearted bride standing by a huge window with a raging storm outside, and at the end, there are all these rotting corpses popping up and reaching for you in a delightfully non-kid-friendly way.

I've mentioned that I haven't written anything but this (damned) blog on my Eurotrip, but at the end of the ride, when the ghost of Melanie the Bride appeared and said (in English and French), "Will YOU marry me?" it really made me want to write a scary story where that exact thing happens.

I mentioned congestion in the park before, and while it did exist, it was in certain parts of the park, like where the parade or fireworks were, but in other spots, there was virtually nobody.  We went into the section where the Indiana Jones ride was, and the sign said the wait was thirty minutes, so we went inside.  The wait wasn't thirty minutes, though . . . it was nothing.  There was literally no line for Indiana Jones et le Temple du Peril, but there were also no lights once you got on it.  So, we went on an outdoor rollercoaster in the dark, cool night, and then got off, went around, and got on it again.  It's a fun coaster, but it didn't even have John Williams music playing on it, so it didn't feel like Indy Jones in any way to me.  We did it three times (still with zero line) until Jeff said he couldn't stand it anymore, then we walked through the COCO-decorated Mexican Afterlife portion of the park, and then . . . well, nothing.

They seemed to be closing early (to me, anyway, I don't know what was really going on), but while the fireworks went off over Sleeping Beauty's castle, a mass exodus out of the park was created by the employees, and oddly, instead of making everyone go out through the main gates, they opened the backstage portions of the park where only employees are allowed, and that's how we left Disneyland.**

The other park, Walt Disney Studios Park, was open an hour later, and we went inside, but only to look at the souvenir shops, which all had the same things for sale, and do battle with the crowds, all of whom had the same idea as us.

They had these big inflatable ghosts outside the park, and Emily wanted to take a picture with them, but the crowds were thick enough we told ourselves we'd hit it up the next day, when the crowds were thinner.  But the next day, they were gone.

Had they ever truly been there to begin with?

We made our way back to the New York Hotel, which was about a half mile away, but Jeff was grateful it wasn't the hotel he'd stayed in the first time, which was another mile down the road.

But wait, there's more!

*Jeff spent on this one meal what I spend in an entire week on food.

**It may sound cool that we got to go through a section nobody gets to go through, but it was just trailers and tables and the backs of attractions, and felt like we were walking behind a Walmart or something.