Paris Part 2: Nuit des Horreurs

Halloween Decorations in the Main Street Square

We managed to enter the Halloween Soiree just as the sun was setting, appropriate for Halloween, but an hour later than we had hoped to. Disneyland always puts an incredible amount of detail into their decorations, and this was no exception. There were orange and yellow flowers, Mickey pumpkins, cartoon ghost statues to take your picture with, Villains out and about, scarecrows on stilts with lanterns, strange creatures, and briar patches shaped like dragons.

The Castle (Sleeping Beauty)

The Castle (Sleeping Beauty)

One of the interesting differences in Disneyland Paris compared to Anaheim is the corridors on the outside of the Main Street shops which feature a "Worlds Fair" theme (from the American perspective of course). 

Worlds Faire Corridor Halloween Night

The Worlds Faire Corridors the next day

 As we were hoping to get reservations at Chef Remy's in the other park that night (Charlotte was dressed as Colette! How could we not?!), we only took a quick look around the basics of Disneyland before hopping over to the other park: Walt Disney Studios Park. Basically, it's California Adventure but "behind the movie scenes" or "making of" style.

Kind of a Buena Vista Street/Movie Set Theme

DO YOU SEE THE GUY. He should give you a sense of SCALE so that you actually believe me when I tell you this is their entire Radiator Springs mountains/plateaus display. Do you feel spoiled now Anaheim goers? Do you remember how big ours looks? Charlotte and I couldn't stop laughing. 

Of course, Chef Remy's was on the other side of the park, so after making our way through several areas we would get to visit later, we made it to the Ratatouille corner. Because what better place to feature Ratatouille than in Paris? 

Buzz guarding Toyland. You can kind of see the woman on the left side of the picture to give you a sense of scale.

Gusteau's in the background! Threes stars! (Or if you're Jeff, 2 and a 1/2)

Ratatouille

The ride is off to the right, the restaurant to the left. 

We weren't able to get a seat at the restaurant that night (it was fully booked), so we made a reservation for the next night. We were severely disappointed the next night, however, when both our phones reverted back to UK time and made us an hour late, forcing us out of our reservation. They weren't able to accommodate us, even after we went to the help area at City Hall to examine other alternatives.
On the bright side, we did make it through the Ratatouille ride once! They did a great job with the set, as usual, but the interesting thing about this ride is it takes Toy Story Mania to another level! No, no game for us to play, but the ride did take you in front of some very large screens with a bend in them that made you feel as though you really were scooting along the floor of a kitchen, the size of a rat. Talk about an immersive 3D experience!

We ended up going back to Disneyland and eating in Toad Hall, where we were introduced to the full extent of the Parisian Disneyland menu: breaded chicken burgers, fries, fish, and "salad". I kind of expected more diversity in Paris.

Toad Hall Panorama

Here are some of our explorations Halloween night:

Space Mountain and the Nautilus

The Mad Tea Party "Tea Cups" Pavilion, from a distance

Adventure is out there!

Adventure Land/ Arabia (VERY cool)

Dome in Adventure Land

What smoky dome is complete without a camel bench?

                   

Can I have one PLEASE?!

http://youtu.be/gQjor3wO2T0

The coolest parts of Disneyland Paris at night were the Swiss Family Robinson Treehouse (which definitely seems bigger at night, looks really fantastic with all the lights in the tree, is much bigger than but really similar to Tarzan's treehouse, and gives a great view of the park), Adventure Land (very Aladdin-themed, and really cool. It's much larger in the Paris set up than in the Anaheim), and the Dragon's Lair (I mean COME ON THEY HAVE A DRAGON).

Behind the castle they had set up a briar patch shaped like a dragon, around which many of the hardly-seen Villains congregated.

Briar Patch Dragon from the back left. 

Briar Patch Dragon front left

In Frontier Land we encountered some interesting winged creatures on stilts, but by far the best costumes we saw were some Ghost Busters we had unknowingly already seen on the train into Paris: they had been running around the platform trying to figure out where to store their large suitcases (three guesses as to what was inside). One of them had a Deadpool shirt on and Charlotte and I would have bet he still had it on when we saw them in costume in the park, just making everything about their costumes more awesome. 

Winged creature on stilts

Fireflies? 

Who you gonna call? Deadpool!

In general Parisian costumes seem to be zombie and Dia de los Muertos themed. Lot of white face paint, dark eyes, fake blood... sometimes odd contact lenses. It seemed oddly generic compared to American halloweens. Still, they could have gotten quite the zombie horde together.

And finally, how could we finish off a day in Disneyland without:

FIREWORKS

Listening to the short story half in French (Wendy)
and half in English (Peter Pan) was a little strange. 

They did a great job projecting animations onto the castle, including making all the spires into rockets themselves!

BOOM!

A LONG TRUDGE BACK THROUGH MAIN STREET

Halloween Decorations!

AND GETTING STUCK AT THE BUS STOP.

Seriously though. There were so many people at the bus stop when we got out of the park, and so many of those people had no idea how to form an orderly line, that Charlotte and I gave up and decided to wait for a second, probably less crowded bus, like civilized people. We were hoping that the kind of people who were pushy enough to crowd the bus entrance like that would be gone on the next bus so we could actually get on it. No such luck. Not only did the guy who had to be physically removed from the bus, restrained from starting a fist fight, and investigated by the police end up on the second bus with us, so did a HUGE number of other people who didn't know how to form lines. I mean, we did talk to some nice British teenagers who were staying or working in Paris before entering Uni, but by that point it was 2am and we were tired and I had been forced to purchase a pair of Chip and Dale fuzzy slippers to make myself even remotely mobile due to the large and painful blister my shoes for my Wendy Darling costume had cut into my heel and neither Charlotte nor myself was interested in making new best friends at that point. Here's a picture of Charlotte to illustrate this point: 

Colette thinking about slicing and dicing, somewhere between 2am and 3am.

We did, despite all crowds and blistered heels, have a ton of fun though. That's what got us up the next morning for a better look at the parks. 

Tea Cups!

Wendy Darling and the SHOES OF HELL.

Paris Part 1: Infiltrating France

Why not here? Why not now? What better place to dream than in Paris?
-Ratatouille, Disney/Pixar

Why not here? The UK is an obvious launch pad for European exploration. It's literally an island unto itself, set on the edge of a continent saturated in history (often of the bloody or sweaty kind). I've had many people advise me to take full advantage of my free time and whatever money I can spare to travel while I'm here, for I'll never get the chance to do so so easily or cheaply again.

Why not now? It was Halloween for pete's sake! What better excuse to travel to new and foreign lands to compare cultural customs? (Not that France is much into Halloween)

What better place to dream than in Paris? OK- for this one, I can think of several, for I certainly did not get much sleep over the three day weekend. I'd say the UK was much better for this, as living here does afford one some time to take things leisurely.

This story starts with Charlotte. By serendipitous coincidence, my friend from high school, Charlotte, ended up going to London this year to be a culinary student around the same time I started my PhD program. While Charlotte will unfortunately be leaving early next year as her program runs only 6 months, her presence affords both some of the familiarity of home and the perfect opportunity for a known travel buddy with the same urgent motivation to see the world as I.
Charlotte (who was for some months a cast member at Disneyland Anaheim) and I decided to check out Disneyland Paris for their Halloween event and to do a flyby of Paris proper in the same weekend. This plan worked out to actually consist of an enormous amount of walking.

After meeting up in London the night before (which involved an hour-late bus and a 3 hour bus ride), Charlotte and I hopped on and off a couple of city buses and did a quick "we're geeky tourists" stop at Speedy's cafe, which happens to be the location of the BBC's 221B Bakers Street front door. Squee!

Arriving in London (Finally!)

Door and cafe look familiar, Sherlock fans?

Traditional English Breakfast. Mine had french fries. WHY?

Our next stop was St Pancras Station, which to me seems to refer to some human organ of perhaps religious significance (?), for the Eurostar, which would take us straight off the edge of England, underwater for 37.9 km and into France in a manner the folks at Normandy probably would have wished they had.
Truthfully though, Charlotte and I though we had just gone through a very long English tunnel when we had actually emerged in France. It's much quicker than you'd think!

St Pancreas Station, leaving for France!

St Pancreas

I think we might be in France. Just a feeling.

Euros. They have pretty colors.

The Eurostar spit us straight out at Disneyland Paris, and Charlotte and I decided to walk around the shopping area outside the park for a bit before trying our hotel.

Where we would be heading later that night.

Always around!

We were highly amused by the celebrities/film characters they chose to put up behind that white bit of this wall. It included the Jonas bros, the twilight trio, Schwarzenegger, and Stallone. 

Charlotte.

Halloween decorations outside the park. 

Made of legos. We were very impressed.

Mostly this area seemed to be restaurants and and some shops, but we were impressed by the hot air balloon. This is, after all, Paris, where November 21, 1783, the first untethered manned flight was performed by Jean-François Pilâtre de Rozier and François Laurent d'Arlandes. (Yes, I wikipedia-ed this. But Charlotte knew it!)

Jean-Fraçois and François may have been untethered, but the people in this one one were. Can't let the tourists use it to get into the park!

One of the most noticeable things about this time of year is (1) the absence of Thanksgiving as a buffer between Halloween and Christmas and (2) the commercial creep of holiday advertising. See below for Exhibit A (mind you, THIS IS ON HALLOWEEN DAY).

I want to eat gingerbread mickeys....

So after getting our fill of fighting our way through other tourists while carrying all of our bags, we hopped on another train to go find our hotel. (You know, after spending an hour waiting for buses, trying to talk to the bus drivers who sometimes barely spoke English to find out which bus our hotel supposedly sent for its residents, getting misdirected and re-directed half a dozen times, and finally going back to the information booth that had originally told us to look for a bus in order to be redirected yet again, this time to the train. Simple, right?)

The outskirts of Paris, as with practically everything we saw while there (with a few exceptions), are gorgeous, by the way. 

The street the train at which the train let us out.

Grassy area outside a pub and the train station

Residences

After turning ourselves around three times, we finally made it to our hotel, which turned out to be reaaaally weird. I might've thought they were going for the Halloween theme, but they just really never turned the light on in the hallway.

Our Hotel

Creepy anyone? I definitely tripped over some garbage bags lying in the hallway several times. 

Finally we put our costumes on and went down to Disneyland to start celebrating Halloween. BUT WAIT! It can never be that simple! We ended up waiting at the ticket booth for an hour because apparently our tickets needed to be printed rather than being scanned straight off our smart phones. Combined with translating English to French and a really terrible internet connection, it became an exercise in patience. Fortunately I think we had adopted an "it is what it is" attitude about the whole trip, which smoothed our ruffled feathers a bit. I had already gotten a head start on "it is what it is" earlier that week when I discovered I purchased a nonrefundable, nonexchangeable Eurostar ticket for the 16th of October rather than the 30th and had to purchase another (those things aren't cheap!).

But anyway, we did eventually get into the park. Halloween time!

The Disney Hotel sits literally right over the entrance.

Halloween decorations over the transition tunnels into the park
(you know, the tunnels under the railroad, just after the ticket collections?)

I replaced Charlotte with Colette from Ratatouille. Thought it was time to exchange travel partners.
To be fair, Charlotte exchanged me for Wendy Darling.

Photo bombing her own photo.

And so, we forayed off into Disneyland... to be continued. Next up: the Halloween Soiree 

City Hall at sunset: let Halloween night begin!