Big Yin and Disneyland Paris - A week of contrasts.

This week I went to see the Big Yin, Billy Connolly in Manchester. As usual he was hysterical. The hair was as wild as always but is now silver in colour. The beard is now nicely trimmed and he prowls the stage with ease in drainpipe trousers and pointy shoes. He came onstage wearing dark rimmed glasses but took them off within a couple of minutes and proceeded to rant and rage about all manner of annoyances in his life. He was onstage for well over 2 hours - without a break, no mean feat for a guy whose now 64 - but as usual with a Billy concert, ( I've seen him 3 times now) I can barely remember anything he said, a point he acknowledges himself during the show. What I do remember however was laughing manically throughout. The guy is a genius and it was, without a doubt a thoroughly good evening.

The lovebirds have truly settled in and have this week been using their play gym. This is a wooden adventure playground that goes on top of their cage and contains several perches, a spiral staircase,a swing, a couple of hanging toys with bells on and four little plastic balls with bells inside. In summary, it's wooden, chewable and noisy. Yogi and BooBoo are besides themselves with joy. The intention with the play gym is to provide somewhere for the birds to play when they're outside of the cage. This is more preferable than the birds swinging off my curtains and chewing through the electrical cables, both activities they appear to thoroughly enjoy.I try to let the birds out for an hour or so each day. Letting them out is easy, the difficult bit is getting them back in again. I've decided that the best way is to use their favourite food, millet seed. If I place the millet in their cage, near one of the many openings, but - and here's the cunning part - just out of reach, then they will come to the opening and once they've realised that they can't reach it from outside, they go straight in. I then rush around closing all of the openings like some demented fool. It's similar to coaxing your little angels in for tea by waving burger and chips at them through the window. They love millet seed although it's the bird equivalent of junk food. It is high in fat and polyunsaturates and has minimal nutrition. I do find it very interesting how their favourite food is their least healthy food and their least favourite food - fresh fruit and veg - is the most healthy. They're just like us humans really in that respect.

I had booked my annual day out in Paris some months ago, when it was a cheap bargain on Easyjet. Thanks as always must go to the mighty http://www.skyscanner.net/ for enabling me to find this, and all of my other cheap flights. I woke at 5:30am and quickly washed, dressed & gathered together the least amount of possessions that I could justify for the trip. I refuse to take a bag on these sort of trips as carrying a bag for 12 hours gets rather weary. I left for the airport at 6am, still dark and as you'd expect for that hour on a Sunday morning, I felt like I was the only person awake in the World. As I watched a glorious sunrise over the motorway, the fingers of light reflecting on the chimneys of the oil refinery (not very romantic I grant you, but I tell it how it is!) my mind turned to what I was actually going to do with my day in Paris. I've been to Paris on numerous occasions and I've been to the majority of Paris' feature tourist attractions. I never tire of these sights but I wanted to do something different on this occasion. It was at that point that I remembered a conversation with my next door neighbour who had commented previously about going to Disneyland. As I drove along the near deserted motorway, I was trying to work out if I could actually do Disney in a day. How long would it take to get to the park from Charles De Gaulle ? - my least favourite airport in the whole wide World and I say that with some experience of the World's airports. What time would I need to be back for check in ? How long would I need to get from the Park to ensure I made check in ? In the end I realised it was going to be tight, that I'd miss more than I would see but it did seem like a really good, fun way to spend the day and I didn't have a plan B. I didn't have a Plan A to be honest but at that precise moment I decided, a day at Disney, it was going to be.

The flight from Liverpool to Charles De Gaulle takes an hour and I shared my flight with a planeload of Irish who were all en route to cheer on their team in the Rugby World Cup. The Irish were playing the Argies at the Parc de Prance for a place in the last 8. The Irish were in good spirits and the craic was good - as Van Morrison once said. At Charles De Gaulle, I deftly negotiated my way past all of my fellow passengers who had the untold delights of a Parisian baggage collection system to contend with and headed for the RER train station. Things were going too well and I was sure I was in for a fall. I didn't have to wait too long. I had a quick look at the map and subsequently misread the closest station for Disney. I bought a ticket for Chateau de Vincennes station. This looked a straightforward trip, Charles De Gaulle to Chatelet Les Halles on RER B then change onto RER A to Disney. As we're approaching Chateau de Vincennes I did notice the lack of children on the train and especially the lack of Micky Mouse Ears adorning the little cherub's heads. Mickey Mouse ears, of course being the accepted International sign that Disney is close by. I dismissed these doubts as it being still quite early in the day, that it was a Sunday and that it was getting towards the end of the season. I left the train at Chateau de Vincennes and emerged bleary eyed into brilliant sunlight and a piercing blue sky.... and into the middle of a Sunday market. This certainly didn't look like Euro Disney had done when I was last there, some 10 years or so ago. The Disney themed shops I remembered had been staffed by young, smily, nubile assistants selling Disney logo'd merchandise but had now apparently been replaced with beetroot faced women of advancing years and pendulous, sagging breasts using paint splattered decorating tables to sell their fruit and veg ! Alarm bells should have been ringing like it was a World Record attempt at amassing the largest and loudest collection of campanologists but I just figured that the park is pretty large so it wouldn't be hard to spot if I just 'walked around for a bit'. I found a map in the Bus Station and realised my mistake, I needed "Vicennes" not "Chateau de Vincennes"! Actually, I didn't need Vicennes either - nothing like it in fact - but hindsight is a marvellous thing. According to the map, Vicennes RER station looked to be just up the road, it was a nice day and seeing a city on foot is so much nicer than being underground. I therefore headed off in the general direction of the suburb of Vicennes. I passed the Chateau that bore the name of this particular area and it was tall, imposing and very impressive but I didn't dwell as I had a station to find, whereupon the Park would be just metres away. As I came to a major road junction, I was surprised to find that there wasn't any signpost for Disney, nor any billboards featuring Mickey wearing his Fantasia wizards hat at the customary jaunty angle. I was beginning to get the feeling that I was in the wrong place. I decided to press on and find the station, so that I could gather my thoughts and find exactly where I needed to be. I did consider asking a local for directions to one of the Worlds largest, but apparently hidden, theme parks but whereas I felt confident in my "excusez-moi monsieur, ou est le Parc de Disney sil vous plait?" I didn't much fancy my chances of understanding the Frenchman's answer, most likely the French equivalent of "You Sir are a total doofus and are hopelessly lost in my great and noble country... You need to go back to whichever station you arrived at and learn how to read a map. Whereupon you will realise that you need to take the RER B3 line to Marne la Vallee, you pathetic English tourist with your terrible weather, bad food, warm beer and hapless sense of fashion"..... Or words to that effect.

As such I pressed on regardless and despite following the signs to the RER Station - which took me so far then the signs seemed to lose interest and stopped abruptly, I couldn't find Vicennes station. I wandered down every road and side street in the town. I passed lots of pretty french houses with shuttered windows and heavy stone facades. With each road, my hopes that it would lead me to a station, or better still, Disney,were cruelly dashed. Now in London, cab drivers have to pass "The Knowledge". This is a very tough exam that requires an encyclopedic knowledge of the streets of London. A knowledge of London, so remarkable it would make Dustin Hoffman in Rainman look positively forgetful. After exhausting every street for seemingly miles around, I have no doubts that if Vicennes had their own local version of "The Knowledge" then I would have passed with flying colours. I was almost hoping that someone would ask me for directions as I was confident that I could direct anybody to any street in the town without a moments hesitation. At one point I did consider staying here for ever and opening a Vicennes Tourist Information Office. It seemed a sensible idea as I clearly wasn't going to find my way out of town. I could run tours to visit the drunks on Rue de Montreuil and to take hordes of camera happy Japanese tourists for a walk around the large building site on Rue Monmoray. However, it was whilst I was thinking of my new life working in French tourism that I almost fell down a subway. This miraculously turned out to be Croix de Chevaux Metro station (No I've never heard of it either)but every station has a map and is a good way out of a sticky situation such as this. I soon discovered my error and had the indignity of having to buy yet another ticket to get me back to a station I had passed earlier in the morning in order to catch the correct train to Disney.

Disney, once I arrived there was fantastic as all Disney Parks are. I jointly hold the family record for Disney Parks having visited 3 of the 5 parks Worldwide. I'm rather disappointed that I've been to Hong Kong twice but never had the opportunity to visit the Disney Park on Hong Kong's Lantau Island and thereby put me clearly ahead in the family Disney Park stakes, with four. The park was as full as I've ever seen at any location and as it was now lunctime everything was in full swing. I quickly found a park map and decided that my plan of attack was going to be Pirates of the Caribbean, Indiana Jones, Buzz Lightyear's Astro Blaster and Space Mountain.
If time permitted, the Phantom Mansion, Small World and Star Tours. I did Pirates first as that is one of my favourite rides, the attention to detail, the smells, the make believe flames, the "yo ho ho, it's a pirates life for me" song, Just fab. I then went to the Indiana Jones ride. In hindsight this was a mistake as the ride lasted a little over a minute but the queue was around an hour. On a schedule as tight as mine this was way too long. As I'm no doubt you're aware, at theme parks they take the queue in a little tour around the ride, snaking up and down and then past the entrance to lead you to believe you're nearly at the front of the line before cruelly snaking up and down again for another half an hour. This means that you pass the same people coming in the opposite direction, every 10 minutes or so for an hour or more. The people you queue with, total strangers of course, become like friends, in fact I've spent more time with people in theme park queues than I have with some girlfriends ! I could almost imagine us having reunions. Anyway, as I'm waiting in line I accidentally caught the eye of a girl aged about 15 coming in the opposite direction with her school mates and then of course every 10 minutes we passed each other and I seemed to catch her eye every time. I felt like some weird perverted stalker. The more desperately I tried to look anywhere but at her, I always seemed to catch her eye. I was dying with embarrassment as I assume, was she. I was so pleased when I eventually got to the head of the queue and didn't have to cross her path anymore. The Indiana Jones ride was excellent but not worth the queue time for such a short trip. I grabbed a bite to eat and headed off to Buzz Lightyear as soon as I could. Now Buzz is one of the best rides at Disney. It's genius. It's a ride where you sit in a moving space craft shaped vehicle, known as a Star Cruiser, that proceeds along a space themed track and all riders, referred to as Space Rangers have their own laser gun to fire. Buzz explains that he needs your help to beat his evil nemesis, a Darth Vader type character called Emperor Zurg. What all of this means is that whenever you see Zurg, his henchman or their various spacecraft during the ride you zap them by manically firing your laser guns. They crop up continually, sometimes to your right, sometimes to your left, sometimes above you, sometimes below, sometimes behind you.
The whole car flicks right and left and even spins through 360 degrees as you proceed through the ride, allowing you to shoot Zurg & his heavies as you go. With each "kill" your personal score increases and at the end of the ride your score is displayed for everybody to see on the big screen along with that of your fellow Space Rangers. In essence, you're playing a sort of real life video game against your fellow passengers whilst physically riding inside of the game with Buzz, Woody and all of the other Toy Story characters cheering you on. Buzz is constantly shouting instructions so that you shoot the right targets to gain the highest scores. It's terrific fun and an idea of true genius as everybody, from young children to senior citizens, are all playing along with smiles so wide we all look like we've eaten coat hangars for lunch. All the while firing hysterically at everything. Fabulous ! I finished with a total score of 5430, which I thought was pretty good until I saw some of the other scores which in some cases totalled well over 300,000 ! How they managed this I have no idea. Another great feature about this game is that you can play Astro Blasters online at home (and get this) against people actually on the ride at Disneyland California! Wowsers !! The link if you want to do this is as follows http://disneyland.disney.go.com/disneyland/en_US/buzzOnline/index?name=BuzzOnlineDownloadPage . Just copy and paste the link into your browser and follow the instructions to download the necessary software. The Buzz ride was followed by the wonderful Space Mountain. This, as I'm sure you'll know, is a roller coaster ride in near total darkness. Space Mountain, as always was great but again the time spent in the queue was really too long given my schedule. The Phantom Mansion was my final ride of the day as I was conscious that I needed to get back to the airport in time for check in at 8pm. Given my error earlier that morning, I was a bit worried of making a similar mistake on the return journey and missing the flight.









My train ride back to the airport was uneventful, as was my flight home,apart from the worlds most annoying child in the seat behind mine. He spent the entire flight kicking my seat, shouting at his dad because he didn't like his seat, refusing to put his seat belt on and then immediately taking it off when his ineffectual Dad put the belt on for him. Despite the obvious health and safety hazard and personal risk to myself, I could happily have opened the door of the aircraft and hauled him out of the plane from 34,000 feet. If being a cheeky Brat was a University course, he would have a Masters degree. Both the airport and the flight were once again filled with Irish rugby supporters, although following a rather dire performance (the fans appraisal, not mine) and a 30-15 defeat to the Argies which put them out of the tournament; they were much less buoyant than they had been on the outbound flight. They were all in good spirits nonetheless due mainly to the fact that they had spent the day drinking good spirits and no doubt the odd pint of the black stuff as well.

I arrived back home a shade after 11pm. Tired but happy and very much looking forward to my bed and to taking off my shoes. - although not necessarily in that order.

My summary of the day? Trying to do Disney in a day was a tall order to say the least and it really isn't possible to do it justice unless you're able to get there very early and leave very late. It is not really possible in a single day with flight & train times and especially with stupid navigational errors such as mine. However, the day was brilliant, I loved every minute of it and will definately do it again...maybe next year, maybe next weekend, who knows ??

So that was my week really, the start of which featured the very un-Disneylike Billy Connolly and ended with the erm, very Disneylike, Disney ! A week of contrasts you may say ?

Things I've learnt this week

1. To check which station I need to get off at beforehand. Quite important this bit.
2. That 7 year old children can be the most irritating people imaginable.
3. That it's possible to feel both a stalker & a pervert at the same time when standing innocently in a theme park queue.

Things that have annoyed me this week:

1. Parking machines that don't give change... Why not ?
2. Human generated Global warming (this may become a common theme in the future)
3. Politicians that don't answer the questions.
4. Queuing.
5. Previously mentioned 7 year old brat.

Things that have made me smile this week:

1. Billy Connolly
2. A colleague stating " I see the f*** up fairy has paid us another visit"
3. Reading a piece in the paper that stated "I dream of a world, when a chicken can cross the road without having it's motives questioned"

Til the next time. ta ta