a positively magical weekend

being in monceau park (where claude monet did some of his paintings) makes me want to talk like royalty and say things like "positively magical" and "exquisite." still being on a giddy high from disneyland paris also makes me overuse words like "fantasy" and "dreams" and "fairytales." so forgive me early on if this entry sounds like i'm trying to be a poet or some sort of renaissance writer or something.



yesterday was stupendous. disneyland paris wasn't much different from the original disneyland, other than it was smaller and missing splash mountain (and what a shame that is). a big difference i noticed was that dland paris was much more detailed...sometimes, disneyland anaheim (from now on referred to as dland OG) feels a bit cheesy and decorated hastily with cute but simple decorations. it seems as if they realized that so for dland paris, they really got into the details. the skeletons on pirates had more realistic curves (in fact, the whole entrance to pirates was more thought out...you walked through dungeons with skulls and leftover weapons and the like); phantom manor looked as if it were once a real house, not just a spectacle; even the halloween decorations were more intense.

ohhhh the halloween decorations! they were everywhere and i loved them (the amount of pictures i took of oozing halloween goo, witches and mysterious halloween creatures will tell you that). i didn't think they were so gung ho about halloween here...i spose i was wrong. or maybe disney is just trying to push the idea more. or maybe the europeans like the american idea of halloween, so dland plays on that. who knows.

my favorite ride by far was space mountain. it was, as i told nat and elisa, 3x better than space mountain at dland OG. yeah, 3x better than the NEW space mountain, too. "oh, nicki, that's impossible!" well, believe it! dland paris space mountain goes upside down and corkscrews through tons of meteors, whipping you through billions of stars and up and over galaxies. we went on it four times and came off laughing so hard we peed our pants (no, really).

oh, another huge (and quite obvious) difference was that everything was in french as well as english...and it sounded like many of the cast members spoke at least english and french, if not spanish, german, italian, etc. listening to the french try to mimic a southwestern accent on big thunder mountain was funny...they failed miserably. but the french on phantom manor was CREEPY. the english version sounded happy happy joy joy compared to the way the french voice said things.

you know how you see tons of couples at dland OG? not at dland paris...our group felt very out of place at ~20 years old and sans enfants.

being in disneyland makes me feel like a joyous little kid. it's amazing the way disney has captured that precise feeling of childhood...those carefree, silly, enchanted-by-princesses-and-happy-endings emotions. it's not as if i needed an escape (life here isn't exactly difficult or stressful school wise/responsibility wise), but it was wonderful to have a day filled with the happiness that only kids and people in disneyland feel. now i'm sitting in what is arguably the most beautiful park in paris (and i think i've got monet on my side, so i have a feeling we might win this debate), watching a million kids and parents run around, laughing and playing games. i'm sitting here on my computer, a random smile creeping up on me subconsciously when i realize how exceptionally perfect life is in this very moment.