This Is Not a Good Sign

My friend Rainne has a Tumblr site called "This Is Not a Good Sign." I'd like to submit this Disney poster for her blog, because truly, this is not a good sign.

A little background first. Heather and I just got back from our Disneyland trip. This was our first trip since the opening of Cars Land. For the record, Heather and I love love LOVE Cars Land. More specifically, we love that it attracts all the people away from our favorite ride, Toy Story Mania, leaving the ride deserted and unloved, like an old toy. Our old toy, that we so dearly love.

If you're not already familiar with it, Toy Story Mania is a midway-like simulation dark ride where you wear 3D glasses while riding through a series of ring tossing, ball throwing, dart shooting arcades. It's great fun and guaranteed to wear out your arm. I got a blister on my finger from a particularly frenzied attack on the last round of mine carts. If you've not been on it, I'd highly recommend it for your next Disney trip.

At the entrance to Paradise Pier. No crowds!

So anyways, back to the poster. There are a series of "vintage" midway posters about the games on the ride, and this beauty is one of them. I love attention to detail Disney is so famous for. Paradise Pier is built to look and feel like a Victorian beach boardwalk, with matching posters and people dressed in period costume, and the effect is enchanting.

Perhaps in Victorian innocence, Flying Tossers should get a bye, but I do crack up every time we go past the poster again. I get it - Flying Tossers, flying saucers. It's a ring toss game themed around aliens. But I wonder if the designers ever knew what it meant, or had a laugh about all the Brits visiting California, wondering why there's a game of Flying Tossers to play with their children.

Three days!!!

When my niece was eight, I told her that I would take her to Disney World - when she was twelve. "That's half my life!" she complained. To an eight year old, four years seemed like an eternity. But we did go to Disney World, and for every year after that, Heather and I have had our thing - Disneyland. Once a year, just me and her. I have the best aunt job ever.

BugVision glasses on, waiting underground for our first "It's Tough to be a Bug" show.

Of course there are other close people in my life - Rob, Thomas, Alice - who also enjoy Disney but Heather is my Disney Twin. If we lived in the Pacific Rim world, we would be mentally compatible for drift, and effortlessly crush any Kaiju coming our way. As long as our way was Disneyland.

She understands the park the same way I do. You have a plan, hit the park early, always do rope drop, make use of Fast Passes, pin trade when the crowds come in and then retreat to your cool hotel room with a bucket of Tony Roma's ribs to watch TV and relax until the crowds disperse and the park is yours again. We've been doing this for three years and we've got it down. I look forward to this trip ALL YEAR. This year has the added bonus that she's started watching Star Trek: Voyager, so we can watch it together in the afternoons. Disney, Star Trek, more Disney. I feel faint just thinking about it.

Little girls who think they're princesses don't get more excited than I do about Disney.

We got delayed this year because of conflicting schedules, but managed to squeeze this in ahead of her first day of high school and my business trip. We leave in three days, and I am beyond all reasonable levels of excited. Little girls who think they're princesses going to a real magic kingdom don't get more excited than this. I've been going through my pin collection, pulling out my least favorite ones for trade. Which Ursula should I keep? Do I break up the Muppets? What are my chances of finding a Baloo to keep Mowgli and Colonel Hathi company?

A few of the hundred or so pins I've collected since our first Disney trip together.

And I've been studying the Disney line wait times for two weeks, using all three apps I downloaded from the iTunes store. Radiator Springs runs out of Fast Passes early, so we'll need to grab one in the morning. Not before hitting Toy Story Mania though, because those lines also build in the morning and there are no Fast Passes there. California Screamin' seems to have lost much of its lines to the opening of Cars Land, so we could grab a Fast Pass for that one on our way out of Toy Story Mania, and still be able to get one for Radiator Springs ten minutes later.

Are you keeping up with all this? If you are, I'd like to know, because if you're tracking this we're probably Disney compatible too.

So. Three days. Between me and the trip stand two 12-14 hour work days, but I'm keeping my eyes on the prize. 

Completely Irrational Decisions

For the longest time I've wanted a Disney annual pass. The idea of being able to waltz in and out of the park without trying to "get your money's worth," is pretty appealing. At $86 a pop for a day at the Magic Kingdom and an hour in line for each of the good rides, you end up packing your day from morning to night. Which is what most people do, making the exodus after the fireworks at midnight look more like a scene from Night of the Living Dead than anything else.

You can almost see Cinderella Castle behind this crowd. All this pictures needs is some strollers and mouse balloons.

But Disney is clever about their pricing. Their annual passport costs just a little more than a two trips on a typical multi-day pass. Their premier passport, providing access to both Anaheim and Orlando locations, won't let you break even until you've taken four trips in a year. Which, by the way, is $979 + tax. Over a thousand dollars. An entire four digits worth of Disney. I live nowhere within driving distance of a Disney. Am I really going to fly four times so I can make use of that pass?

And yet, if I'm ever going to experience that magical feeling like I belong to that exclusive annual passholders club, it should be this year. My year of Disney! Watching and observing Disney people do Disney things! Surely I need keys to the Kingdom to take this on, right?

(I don't really. I calculated it out. It's actually cheaper to buy a a multi-day pass to each park once. But after seeing the numbers I realized that it wasn't why I wanted the passport. And I think Disney knows that. It's not about being practical, it's about being part of something and that feeling of being part of Disney - like a member.)

TWO castles! Six parks and two water parks! If I were a kid I'd be throwing a tantrum for this right now.

So here I am stuck in indecision. I am leaving for Disneyland in six days, so I better have decided by then because if I'm going to buy a pass now is the time.

By the way, I'm also mad at them, because they don't sell a Disney global pass, and what kind of business misses the chance to wave such an aspirational WANT in front of their rabid fans? There always should be a completely unreasonable top-end item that keeps their customer base aspiring.

So your honest opinion - would it be completely irrational DINKy spoiled brat of me to get a premier passport?

The beginning

That's me in the center there with the haircut like a boy, being squashed beyond an enthusiastic mother, a sister (blocked) and a giant Goofy, who looks like he's about to eat my sister.

When I was six years old, my family moved to Nicaragua in search of a better life, fleeing the instability of the new Taiwanese government and endless threats of communist Chinese attack. That decision proved to be a bit of a mistake, as no more than a month passed after our arrival before the Sandinistas started shooting things. I don't remember much of that, bits and pieces about flashes and bangs and lying down on the floor when the fighting got close. But mostly I remember the mango grove behind our house and the giant iguanas that roamed around everywhere and the occasional scorpion that made all the adults freak out. 

My parents got us on the last commercial flight out of the country, apparently using some creative navigation to get through some overturned burning buses on our journey to the airport, landing in Miami with a few suitcases and $400 hidden in their shoes. That first night in a Miami hotel I can remember even with my shoddy memory, sitting there watching the news without understanding a word, while eating pork and beans warmed in a tub of hot water and bread toasted over our bedside lamp. Then there was a long, seemingly endless Greyhound journey north where I cried a lot because...well, apparently I just cried a lot in those days and was a pain in the neck. My parents didn't know how long we could stay in this country, but by golly now that we were here they were going to take their kids to Disney World before we were all deported. We got the cheapest tickets into the park, the ones with limited tickets to rides (remember E-tickets???), but it must have cost us $40 even back in 1979. My parents spent ten percent of everything they owned to give us those precious days. Even now, whenever I'm thinking evil thoughts about various perceived parental hurts inflicted on my childhood, I remind myself - Disney World. Remember what they did at Disney World. I think it might also be where I picked up that bit of carpe diem in my personality which is leading me to pursue this crazy dream today.

I remember only little bits of that trip. The wonder at Cinderella Castle. The crushing disappointment that Snow White, my favorite princess at the time, turned out to be not at all princess-looking but a bit old and freckly. It was a serious blow because we had spent all day hoping to find her at the park and until I saw her I had been convinced she was real. 

The world Walt Disney had created was real to me. I had seen the movies Fantasia and Snow White. I was convinced that the evil witch popping up repeatedly in the Snow White dark ride was out to kill me, and I kept my hands clamped firmly over my mouth so that she wouldn't slip me a piece of poison apple while I was looking at something else. My parents and sister tormented me about my fear of ghosts in the Haunted Mansion. We had ice cream cones and rode around in the first row of the horse-drawn carriage down Main Street.

This was America.

That's my mom in the corner, looking so stylish in her best suit and sunglasses.

It was the kind of America we dreamed about. Mei guo - "Beautiful Country" - with cute storefronts and clean streets and smiling people and endless possibilities. I was a kid, so I probably didn't have that kind of a dream. I probably dreamed about castle and princesses and endless rides and ice cream cones. But even then, I think the effect of being in America, in the most American of all places, really got into part of my psyche and stayed there.

After Disney World, there was Disneyland as my family moved to California and got settled and earned citizenship. And then more trips back to Orlando in my college and young adult years. And last year, my first trip to Disney Tokyo, where I binged on too many flavors of popcorn. But what always blows my mind is that first experience, the power that the Disney brand had over a family with almost no money from Taiwan, who thought it was worth it to spend ten percent of everything they owned to see Disney World. My parents. My conservative, fiscally responsible parents. Even back in 1979, the global force was already there. It hadn't yet grown up and expanded its theme parks into Asia and Europe, become the entertainment juggernaut it is today, yet the magic already had reach into all the corners of our small world. 

I want to be a part of that magic somehow. I've wanted to work for Disney for pretty much my entire adult life. When I was in college and a mechanical engineering student I poured all my energy into the ImagiNations competition, hoping to win a summer internship with the Imagineers. I won a t-shirt after four weeks of sweat and tears. As an independent consultant I've met people from Disney at business functions and conferences. But nothing ever came of those meetings, and I'm starting to fear that I will never find that Disney project of my dreams. So here goes: I'm making that project. My client is me and there's no project budget and the expectations are high, but so what. It's time to wish upon that star.

I don't remember this picture being taken. But it says "Cinderella Fountain," so I'm pretty sure this was taken in Orlando. But who is that giant rabbit??? He looks like something that a Disney knock-off in China might have created, or one of those creepy creatures that walk around at a Six Flags. If you have a clue about this, let me know.

This Was the Epiphany

I was sitting in the Little Mermaid musical at Tokyo DisneySea, watching Ariel and her fishy friends flip through the air singing "Part of Your World." I had retreated to Disney after two weeks of trying to understand Japanese culture for a research project, and I was, frankly, Japanesed out. I was tired of eating fish for breakfast and remembering to change slippers between the living room and the bathroom and listening to people who weren't just speaking a foreign language but were trying to communicate completely foreign concepts in that foreign language. I was just tired.

Any Disney castle makes me feel like a kid again.

So I went to the most American place I could think of, the place where I might feel most at home for just a day and not think about all things Japanese before I went back into Japanese empathy for one last week. I went to Disneyland and DisneySea.

Where I sat now watching, enraptured by the puppetry and the singing and the sensation that I was on the sea floor with mermaids and fish dancing above me. Completely, utterly transported, until suddenly my research took a dive straight into Ariel's grotto. Our headstrong heroine rebuffed the sea witch, decided that land wasn't so great after all, her family and friends were more important, and lived happily ever after underwater.

Wait, what the **** just happened?

Yet there Ursula was, retreating into the shadows, while Sebastian's band started kicking up the first toe-tapping measures of the "Under the Sea" finale.   Twisting around to see if I was the only person who noticed, I saw everyone had the same expression that I had, 30 seconds before The Little Mermaid got a major makeover. No one noticed that this was a major change to the story. And then it was over.

Clutching my translator unit, I stumbled out of the auditorium. I must have missed something, was the only thing I could think. Disney would never allow this kind of story change. I must have misread the translation.

So I did the only thing I could do, because it would have bugged me forever otherwise - I turned around and walked back into the auditorium for the next showing. Ariel emerged, brushing her hair and dreaming of land. Ursula shows up, offering a chance to live a new life above ground. Nope, no mistranslation there. Ariel is coming to the realization that following her dream would mean leaving everything she knows behind. And she decides to stay. Again.

How very Japanese of her.

Weeks of being in Japan, and I was never able to connect 

this subway sign with anything I'd learned. If anyone knows 

how this makes sense, please tell me!

All week people in Japan have been telling me about insularity, belonging to your group and staying loyal to it above all else. Students didn't do foreign exchange. Being different and risking everything for a dream was not an ideal anyone subscribed to. I had nodded and wrote it down and thought I understood. I just didn't realize how deeply those ideas permeated the society.

That was the epiphany. I realized there that nowhere do cultural differences emerge as strongly as the environment you're most familiar with, transplanted to another country. You read about these cultural differences in guidebooks and research articles. But it's not the same as seeing two versions of the same thing, translated into its own culture.

My name is Ana. I'm 40 years old. (! - when did that happen?) And I really, really want to go to Disneyland. And Disney World. And Disney Sea. And Euro Disney. And even Hong Kong Disney, which all the Disney fans say is only worth half a day of your time at most. But I don't care, because I really, really want to go see how they've all been transformed by their native countries. Barbecue pork bun instead of smoked turkey legs? What do Country Bears sing in Hong Kong? And how will the French handle all the fast food served in theme parks???

This is my new project. I am giving myself a year. I am going to do a world tour of Disney.