Disneyland Entrance

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This is the entrance to the theme park at Disneyland Paris—sort of.

See, at Disneyland Paris, the prestigious Disneyland Hotel is not separated from the park; in fact, it sits right over the entrance to the park. The building you see here, then, is the Disneyland Hotel. The park is behind it. The hotel overlooks the “real” entrance to the park, which is just behind it. It's an extremely nice hotel, by the way, but pricey (the most expensive of the several hotels in the park, in fact).

If the hotel were invisible, you'd be looking right through the front entrance onto Main Street.

Anyway, as you can see, there are extensive gardens in front of this theme park. The parking lots are quite a walk away; the park is actually situated to be right next to the Métro station Torcy_Marne-la-Vallée, which literally sits right in the center of the Disneyland Paris resort. So the locals can take the subway out to Disneyland and step out right in front of the park. It was quite an accomplishment for Disney to cut such a deal with the local authorities, but it works well.

Unfortunately, while the resort itself is a great place, many of the eastern suburbs around it are kind of scummy, and the pleasant atmosphere of the park magnetically attracts a lot of low life in the evenings, particularly on weekends. Park security does their best but they can't really throw people out just for being low life, unless they cause trouble (which they unfortunately do, sometimes).

Photographed in April, 2002.