I went to Florida last week. Mostly to visit my sister, who lives there, but also so she could show me around Disney World. Having not been to Disney World in about twelve years, I was a little nervous about whether I would actually enjoy being there as an adult.
The first day, the idea that I was no longer the sort of person who would enjoy Disney World seemed entirely plausible. I took a long walk from my hotel to Disney Springs, which is basically Disney World's shopping district, and then spent another couple of hours looking for a place to sit and get some work done. Which led to me examining the structure of the park in ways the designers probably don't want guests doing, at least not while they're there.
The first thing I noticed was the sound design, something my sister's vlog has primed me to pay attention to. The soundscapes in different areas of a park work best when you're just passing through; if you sit down in the wrong place, as I did under a sandwich shop awning, and then again at an ice cream place, the different styles of music conflict in ways that make it hard to focus.
The second thing that occurred to me, while I was making my way from the ice cream shop to the Starbucks at the other end of the park, was that I really felt like a tourist, but that there was nothing wrong with feeling like a tourist. In fact, Disney World is, if nothing else, the archetypal experience of being a tourist, because everyone is a tourist, and there are no natives to offend.
That in itself was a weird feeling, and it made the rest of Disney Springs feel especially fake. Like it wasn't trying to be anything realer than a deliberate imitation of a place. Except for the Starbucks. It felt like a real Starbucks, and it had power strips at all the tables, so I spent the afternoon working there.
By the time my sister came to pick me up for dinner, I'd realized that I would need to actively get myself into a theme-park-appreciating mindset the next day, otherwise I'd spend the whole time feeling like a tourist, nitpicking and not actually enjoy my time in the parks. I prepared myself the next morning by listening to the Moana soundtrack with my sister as she drove us to Epcot, and by the time we got there, I was ready to take Disney's constructed World as it presented itself. To be, not a nitpicky tourist in a cardboard village, but a gracious guest in the archetypal experience of being a guest.
Update: The sequel to this post is on my sister's Youtube channel in Glorious Jump-Cut-o-Vision.
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