Background – or starting out with low expectations
So that’s our plans for the trip – now a little background. I spent a day at DLP in 1996 with my then boyfriend, as we were staying with a friend of mine, who was studying in Paris and I wanted to go and see what the new park (it had only opened a couple of years earlier) was all about. By this time, I’d been to Florida three times with my family – the most recent visit to
WDW being only two months earlier, so I guess you could say I’d started to get the Disney bug. The problem was my expectations. If you asked me to do a word association game and gave me Disney as a word, sooner or later I’d have come up with the words “hot” and “sunny”. Well not at Disneyland Paris that day. It was freezing – I never knew the north of France could be that cold!
The wind was absolutely biting and that was my abiding memory of the day – not a good start.
DH however had never been to DLP, but instead of thinking “he’ll have a great time, he didn’t have the bad experience I did”, I was worrying about whether he’d enjoy it as well. The problem you see, is DLP is in France. Now this is a problem because the French are not DH’s favourite people. In fact, they are probably his least favourite people. I guess Americans can now relate more to this, after recent events over Iraq and the French reluctance to get involved there, but the British as a race have had never liked the French for many centuries and it’s a pretty mutual thing. We’ve fought numerous wars over the years and today, we’re both still very proud nations. It doesn’t help that the French as a nation believe everyone should speak French and the British as a nation believe everyone should speak English. I’m over generalising here, but you get the idea.
DH is certainly a typical Brit, in the nicest possible way. He does not speak French and believes they should all speak English. On the other hand, I speak French, German, Spanish and Italian (admittedly not very well!) and don’t think we should expect others to speak our language. However, I guess he does have a point when it comes to DLP – it is, as he says, an American ideal and an American company and therefore you expect it to operate the same as you would in
WDW. That’s fine in theory, but before we went I’d heard so many horror stories from trip reports on other boards that I had the impression that this wasn’t in fact how it worked.
The two main complaints I heard (and this is probably to do with the French, rather than DLP itself) were:
People smoke everywhere in the park and ignore any no-smoking signs(we have noticed smoking a lot more popular in continental Europe than it is in the UK or America)
People do not stand in queues for food or characters – there is no concept of queuing and people just barge in at the last minute.
Both of these things are things which intensely irritate DH (and myself, although I often stay quiet for an easy life). I’d also heard that the CM’s aren’t as friendly as they are in
WDW, there’s the obvious problem of the weather not being as “hot” and “sunny” and there isn’t apparently very much to do in the new Studios theme park. Add all these together and you can see why perhaps I wasn’t looking forward to our DLP trip, as much as I was looking forward to our 2004
WDW trip.
The other problem was finding information – there isn’t a lot on the Internet about DLP. I did pick up a very good guidebook early on, called “A Brit’s guide to Disneyland Paris”, which was full of useful tips and our travel agent sent us a guidebook with our tickets about a fortnight before we travelled, but someone needs to come up with an equivalent site to Deb Wills’ one, but made for DLP. There is just nowhere to find details of menus, there are very few restaurant reviews and I couldn’t even find opening times for many of the restaurants, so I didn't know if they served just dinner or lunch as well. Therefore, I will admit I felt very ill-equipped going into this holiday.
Four days before we left, I did finally find a good site –
DLP guidebook which had some useful information on, such as what would be down for rehab while we were there. I discovered there’d be three attractions would be closed while we were at DLP – Indiana Jones (as that’s a roller coaster and we don’t do those, that wasn’t a problem) Autopia (Tomorrowland's Indy Speedway from
WDW – again not something we’d ever go on), but the third one was a blow – for me at least! It’s A Small World would be down for rehab while we were there. I think this discovery made DH’s night, as he can’t stand this ride – but it’s so Disney I feel we’ve got to go on it every time we’re at Disney. Well, not this time at least. It could've been a lot worse – the Auto Stunt Show was scheduled for rehab the day
after we were due to leave and if we’d missed that, I’d have been really disappointed.
A few last minute panics, like waiting until the last minute to get extra memory cards for our digital camera, losing (and then fortunately finding!) the power pack for the digital camera and torrential rain the night before we were due to leave, and finally departure day arrived….