So I went to Disneyland. In Paris.

So, before you read any further, you should know that this post will be full of me basically being a little 10-year-old girl on her first ever trip to a Disney park. I'm serious. Don't say I didn't warn you... During my 2-week break from school at the beginning of May, I went to Disneyland Paris. And it was awesome. And utterly exhausting. But basically the best thing I've done in the last couple of months. I went with my dear friend Lindsey. She's American too, but she's been living in Paris for the last 5 years or so, and teaches 5th grade at a French school in the area. We have a mutual love for all things French, Disney, and fairy-tale related. And it was her birthday. I mean, seriously. Who doesn't want to spend their 28th birthday at Disneyland? So we had a slumber party at her house two nights in a row, drove to Disney together (with accompanying Disney music playing, of course) spent about fourteen hours in the park, and had a fabulous time.

In order for you to fully understand how exciting and awesome this was for me, I think you need a little background. I don't come from an amusement park sort of family. My first trip to an actual amusement park was with my Aunt Melissa and Uncle Michael when I was a kid. It was the 6-flags in Dallas, which is actually pretty great. This was made all the better by the fact that Michael is basically a 13-year-old boy disguised as a middle-aged pet-sitter. After that first time, all of my trips to amusement parks and stuff have been school-organized, and they've all been to that same 6-flags park in Dallas. I say all this to just point out that amusement parks are a treat for me. I come from a history and art museum-going family, so any old amusement park is exciting and rare. So a Disney one? Hugely exciting.

The second bit of background you probably need to get how exciting this was for me is that I am a Disney and Once Upon A Time freak (and so is Lindsey). You know you're invested in Disney when you take the required Women's Studies course at Agnes Scott and somehow make it out of Hackett's class with your Disney love still (mostly) intact. That takes skill, right there. We are also crazy Once Upon a Time people. If you aren't familiar with the show, you need to be. It's pretty simple, really, you know your basic TV show. Snow White, Prince Charming and basically every other fairy tale character you knew and loved as a kid actually lived in an alternate universe. Unfortunately, The Evil Queen (yes, as in Snow White's stepmother) was really mad that Snow and Charming got their happy ending, so she cast this curse which tore everyone away from the land of fairy tales and stuck them in a little town called Storybrooke Maine, where they are stuck in a timeless haze for 28 years until Snow White and Prince Charming's daughter (born just before the curse, and who happened to escape) comes to break the curse. Oh, and of course they don't remember who they are. So you've basically got these two parallel stories (real-world and fairy-tale) being told concurrently. It's really not that complicated, I promise. It's produced by ABC, which is also Disney, so they get to bring in a lot of the Disney stories we know, but always with a Once twist. You should all go give it a try if you've ever enjoyed a fairy tale. It just finished its second season, and it's one of those shows you really need to watch from the beginning to get. So get thee to Netflix!

So now you get why this was so awesome for me. I've always had a bit of a soft spot for the villans in stories, so excuse all the villan-loving that is about to happen. These are some of the pictures from the Snow White ride (aka Blanche-Neige et les Sept Nains). Here we have a copy of the actual spell book that the Evil Queen used to exact her revenge on Snow White. For those of you who don't speak French, it says "The Antidote for the poisoned apple: The victim of the sleep of death can only be awakened by love's first kiss." muahahahahaha!

Now because my dear Lindsey is awesome, she found us super cheap tickets to both parks for the day (I think we paid around $55 apiece for a 1 day, 2 parks ticket) which meant we got to go into Disney Studios and go on her favorite ride of all time: The Tower of Terror. Twice. Lindsey has been to the Disney park in Orlando a bunch of times with her family, so she knows all the good stuff at the park. And this is the ride she loves. So to document the "It's my birthday and I'm about to ride The Tower of Terror!" moment, I took a quick shot of us waiting in line. I gotta say, she was right about it being awesome. If you don't know about it, it's like a hotel with a haunted elevator in it. You get in the elevator and get all strapped into the seats, then goes up and free-falls at random intervals while you scream in terror. It was so awesome we had to do it twice!

The photo on the left is pretty much entirely for my Uncle Michael's benefit. He should have been there with us, but unfortunately he couldn't make it across that pesky Atlantic Ocean. So instead all he gets is a photo of some of the original Snow White publicity. Sorry dude. But hey, look! I got to meet Geppetto! Pinocchio wasn't around, though. He was the only character we actually got to go up to and get a picture. We saw the Evil Queen (who is my absolute favorite of of Once Upon a Time) but she wasn't available for photos. We had apples in our bag for lunch, so we really wanted to get a completely nerdy picture of us with Regina, the Evil Queen herself while biting into our beautiful red apples, but alas, it was not to be. We did get a pretty good look at her though!

 One of my favorite things about the park was the castle. it was beautiful (that's the castle I'm posing in front of at the top of the post). Now, as I understand it, the castle in the parks back in the States is Cinderella's castle. I haven't actually been, so correct me if I'm wrong. This castle is Princess Aurora's castle, as in Sleeping Beauty. Of all the old original Disney films, Sleeping Beauty is definitely my favorite, so I loved this. It was complete with a moving, growling Maleficent in dragon-form down in the dungeon.

I loved this storybook.  "La Belle au Bois Dormant" is of course, the French title for "Sleeping Beauty" and they had several copies of the storybook open to appropriate scenes in front of the stained glass and tapestries upstairs. It was all in French, of course, which was great.

The tapestries and stained glass upstairs in the castle were just beautiful. As you walked around the upstairs portion of the castle, you can see the Sleeping Beauty story told through stained glass and beautiful tapestries on the wall. One of my favorites was this one on the left, with Maleficent in all her evil green glory. The tapestries were beautiful and detailed as well.





What I think I really loved though was the style of the castle. As I mentioned before, the French title for Sleeping Beauty is "La Belle au Bois Dormant" which translates as "The beauty asleep in the woods" (there's a certain amount of ambiguity there, so it could also be translated as "the beauty in the sleeping woods" but as the title comes from the well-known pre-Disney story, the first is the more accepted translation). So they took that title and really made the inside of the castle look like a forest. The columns throughout the castle are all carved to look like these beautiful trees, as well as the ceiling and balcony carvings; and the way the sun comes through the windows and lights up the room really continues this illusion that the castle was built out of a forest. I absolutely loved it. And then, when you get to the end of the story, you get this beautiful "Happily Ever After" window with accompanying French text, which somehow makes it more romantic. If you don't speak French, or can't read that text carved above the window, it says: "And it was in this way that Aurora was awoken by True Love's first kiss. And they lived happily ever after." Fun little fact from your resident language freak: In French, oftentimes when they say "happily ever after" they say "Et ils vécurent heureux et eurent beaucoup d'enfants." Which translates to "And they lived happily and had a bunch of kids." Oh those French...

Well all-in-all, it was a really wonderful trip. We had tons of fun, ended up meeting up with some of Lindsey's French friends and their kids for a nice birthday dinner at the Rainforest Cafe, and then drove on home after a very full and exciting day. Who'd have ever thought that my first real Disney park adventure would be in Paris?