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If we’ve proved one thing, it’s the following equation:

wine + pina colada + gin and tonic + wine + cosmopolitan + wine + a little bit of food + seven rides on an upside-downy roller coaster + wine = bleurgh!

A very cool night. They closed the Studios half of the park so we could have the run of it to ourselves, which meant no queueing for the Rock ‘n’ Roller Coaster. A very fast, in-the-dark ride that seems to suck all the air out of your lungs with the force of the initial acceleration, and barely lets you gasp for breath until it dumps you back at the starting line a minute and a half later.

Why did we ride it so many times? Well, the lack of a queue was obviously a factor, but also the fact that you got a different ride wherever you sat. In the very front seat you never knew what was coming, as the flashing lights were always behind you. In the very back seat you got thrown around as the tail of the coaster lashed around. In the middle you seemed to experience the most lost gravity, being thrown up in the air more often than in any other spot. The seats in between were a mix of them all.

Feeling wobbly-legged, not only from the ride, we spent a lot of the night taking stupid pictures with the cameras they’ve lent us for the duration of our stay, in the dark of the studio where we were eating and drinking, or in the ice throne from Narnia, that made us look like school kids on stage at the end of a Christmas pantomime.

It’s very difficult to remember you’re in France here. It’s a strange nether-world; not quite America, not quite European. It’s only if you walk to the furthest edges of the park and glimpse a roadsign in that iconic narrow font of which French road builders are so keen that you remember where you are.

There’s a wall of famous hand-prints in the Disney Village, which serves as an interesting gauge of different celebrities’ celebrity status. Everyone who passes it seems to stop and put their own hands in someone else’s prints for comparison, so the most popular (George Clooney and Bruce Willis to name two) are now quite dirty while the ones that are far from being ‘down with the kids’ (Bob Hope and Lorri Peterson, whoever she is) are still as clean and white as the day they were pressed.

I was initially quite impressed that all these trans-Atlantic celebrities had taken the time to come here for a pressing, but go suspicious when I spotted a duplicate for Joe Pesci and looked for some other pairings. They’re obviously made from a reference set of hand negatives kept safe in a Hollywood Vault and reproduced when required.

I wonder if the people to which the hands are attached get paid a royalty for each one.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 27th, 2006 at 10:09 pm and is filed under Europe, Work. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.