Euro Disney
Monday, August 29, 2005
Getting up nice and early we raced out the door and off to the train station. There are three main kinds of train systems in Paris – general international / intercity, metro or underground and something kinda in the middle of those two, which goes under and over the ground very similar to the S Bahn of Germany but more confusing, compounded by the fact that you are obviously meant to know where your going as we’ve mentioned before the French aren’t to good at letting you know. Anyway we had to take line ‘A4’ which left at platform A along with all the other ‘A’ trains but they don’t have a sign to say ‘A4’, they just have a sign displaying all the stops that are possible and then lights to the side of each stop ‘light-up’ to indicate that the train will stop at that station. It took us a while to figure out which one was Disney land and then figure out what train we wanted. If it sound’s confusing that’s because it was! Finally we jumped on a train and settled in for what looked like it would be a longish ride ending up being about three quarters of an hour. By the time we arrived the train was full of very excited ‘little takkers’ and their parents, so when the doors opened there was a rush as they all wanted to be first! We however got held up at the exit of the station, by our tickets not letting us exit. All the little kids had long gone along with everyone else and we were still standing on the platform all alone wondering what we had done wrong. We started to look around and found out that we needed a zone 4 ticket, not the zone one ticket that we had used.(The information officer that had told us how to get to Disneyland earlier obviously thought that it wasn’t necessary to let us know that we had to buy the different ticket). You can get on the train with your standard ticket but when you get to your destination you can’t leave – Well you can leave but only after paying the €25 per person fine and although this does include the ticket home it’s still a rip-off. After cursing the French and everything that is French we tried to find someone to help us only to be approached by a technician who was fixing a turnstile off to the side to see if he could help. You could tell what was going through his mind – Bloody tourists, but after he made us sweat for a couple of minutes he then said ‘OK’ and swiped his card letting us through the exit and saving us one hundred dollars! So as we walked away we forgave the French or at least gave them some breathing room for another day…
Inside Disney land was some strange American-French mix but was definitely Disneyland. We raced around for a bit getting onto Space Mission2 and Star Tours before looking at the map and working out a plan of attack. We had lunch and then went about the park going on heaps of rides – I think that we picked a good day as the lines where quite small for the whole day the longest we waited was around 30 minutes. So it was easy to see most of the park by the time the park closed at 8pm – no night parade in Europe. We made sure that we bought the right ticket home getting in at 9.30 and promptly passed-out.
posted by Maarty @ 12:00 am,
