Item From the Past: Tivoli, København

Lørd. 18. juni 1983

Tivoli has a lot of what you'd expect at an amusement park, such as junk food and baubles for sale at high prices, but also has features Six Flags (say) lacks, such as slot machines and roulette wheels. At first I wandered around, enjoying the crowd and the lake and the flowers. I rode the roller coaster and some other rides, not bad but not the adrenaline rush North American amusement-park rides try to be, and also visited the hall of mirrors. Then I went into the odd Louis Tussard's Wax Museum -- founded by a descendant of Mme Tussard, it seems -- at the Hans Christian Andersen Castle. [Owned by Ripley Entertainment, and since closed. Believe it or not.]

Odd as in an odd mix of historic figures in wax and current celebrities in wax. Wax Hitler and Wax Einstein were seated at the same table, facing each other over a chess set. They were playing chess, in fact. Except that they weren't: the pieces seemed to be on the board randomly. Nearby, Wax John Travolta was dressed for the 2001 Odyssey.

Enjoyed the Hall of Danish Kings & Queens, though I realize how little I know about this particular monarchy. Best dressed: Christian IV, who had the sartorial advantage of living in the 17th century.

After the wax museum, I caught a clown-and-elephant act on an open-air stage, and then joined Rich and Steve for dinner. Fine roast pork for me, at a more reasonable price than I expected from an amusement park. Afterwards the three of us saw some aerial acrobatics by two men in tights and two women in white-sequin bikinis, then settled in for a concert by the Tivoli Symphony Orchestra, also known as the Copenhagen Philharmonic Orchestra. [I like the Danish name: Sjællands Symfoniorkester.]

I didn't recognize everything they played (one piece was by Beethoven; other selections were from Pictures at an Exhibition) but they played wonderfully, especially the guest violinist, one Cho-Liang Lin, originally from Taiwan, I believe. The conductor, a Korean named Myung-Whun Chung, had a lively set of moves.

The ballet afterward was less compelling, and I had to stretch my legs anyway, so I wandered over to the slot machines. Fun for a few minutes -- and a quick way to lose 30 kroner, which I did. Rich did, too. At exactly 11:45, the fireworks started, pretty much straight up from where we were standing, in among a large crowd. Colors lit up the sky, then ashes rained down on us.

2010 Update. I don't know if I'll ever make it back to Denmark, but here's a reason to go: Exact Replica Of Graceland Under Construction In Denmark. Full story here.

Item From the Past: Socal 2001

May 24. I last visited Disneyland in 1973, though I saw the Florida part of the empire in 1982 . My visit at nearly 40 was enjoyable, and I appreciated at least one thing I didn’t at age 12. The second ride we took was the Pirates of the Caribbean, sitting in the first row and getting wet, just like in '73. This time I marveled at the detail of the mechanical characters and their movements, and the lighting and the sound effects, all so coordinated so precisely. It struck me how labor-intensive the park must be, how much constant effort it is to keep the thing running day after day. So I didn’t feel that the ticket prices — $43 for an adult — were quite so high. Disney has a reputation for rapaciousness, but at least they put on a high-quality show for the money. And the irritating A-E ticket system is long gone.

Lilly wasn’t occupied with that kind of musing, and enjoyed almost everything from beginning to end. Luckily, skies were overcast most of the day, and temps no more than 70°. Besides the Pirates, we rode — an exhausting list, but not an exhaustive one — Splash Mountain, Davy Crockett’s Explorer Canoes, the Adventureland Jungle Cruise, Gadget’s Go Coaster, the Raft to Tom Sawyer Island, the King Arthur Carousel, the Mad Tea Party, Dumbo the Flying Elephant, Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride, the Astro Orbitor (sic), Star Tours, the Haunted Mansion, the Disneyland Railroad and Autopia.

Gadget’s Go Coaster, a mild roller coaster in the part of the park known as Toontown, was Lilly’s very first experience on a roller coaster — but likely not the last, since she enjoyed it immensely, as she did a number of other fast rides, though Splash Mountain scared her enough at the end to make her cry a bit. At 40 inches in height, she just met the requirement for all but the fastest rides. Besides waiting in lines and riding rides, we also ate a meal, modest by Disney standards, and bought some items, again modest by the park’s standards. We stayed until closing — 9 p.m. — and Lilly fell fast asleep as we strolled her back to the Candy Cane Inn. We didn’t stay up much later myself, and I remember a mild burning sensation in both feet as I drifted off to sleep.

May 25. An easier day. Got up too late for the motel’s no-extra-charge breakfast, so I ventured across Harbor Blvd. to a doughnut shop in a strip mall. Cambodian family doughnuts, I believe — I once read in the WSJ that Cambodian refugees had pretty much taken over the doughnut trade in southern California, edging out the chains. Anyway, the doughnuts were good & fresh, and the proprietors could have been Cambodian, though I couldn’t recognize their language as Khmer. I never did see any chain doughnut shops as I drove the streets of Orange County.

By noon or so, we had driven to downtown LA. We parked near Little Tokyo — $3 all day, an amazing rate that would be five or six times more in downtown Chicago — and spent some time in that district, still Japanese but a shadow of its pre-WWII self, I have heard. Had an authentic inexpensive Japanese lunch there. Then we went looking for the Los Angeles City Hall, to take in the view from atop its tower, but the whole thing is undergoing renovation, and was completely closed. So we boarded the Metro subway, something that didn’t even exist when I was in town last. Very convenient, practically brand-new, and a little too clean, something like the Singapore subways.

We got off at the Hollywood and Vine station and walked westward on Hollywood Blvd., finding the street as seedy as I’d heard, but enjoying the stars on the sidewalk. By the time we got to Gaumann’s Chinese Theatre, the street had improved somewhat. The Chinese Theater was very popular, with people walking all over the forecourt impressions in the cement. Marilyn Monroe’s seemed the most popular, with a small line of woman waiting to put their hands in the prints, which looked worn. After a look at the nicely restored Roosevelt Hotel across from Gaumann’s, including a look at the room in which the first Academy Awards were handed out, we rode back downtown and picked up the car, driving back to Orange County — Knott’s Berry Farm’s Chicken Restaurant — for dinner. Tasty chicken, and Yuriko reported the ribs good too.

May 26. Another late start. More Cambodian doughnuts. Hit the road again, first stop Griffith Park. Was it too much to ask for a nice view of the city from the famed Observatory? It was. The clouds were low that morning, so most of LA was invisible. Still, the Observatory was interesting, including the bust of James Dean. We headed north from there on California 101, which roughly follows the Camino Real (signs tell you this). With half as many cars, it might have been a more pleasant drive, just like most of the other freeways in metro LA.

We arrived in Santa Barbara in the early afternoon, and the drive became much more calm on SB’s streets, which are picturesque and, but for some architectural differences, reminded me of the well-appointed streets of Santa Fe. At Mission Santa Barbara, a lovely old place, a festival was in full swing, so we stayed there awhile, eating and looking at the artwork chalked on the plaza in front of the mission. Later, we drove downtown and ambled along State Street, SB’s glossy and busy shopping street.

At 5 p.m. we came across the Santa Barbara County Hall of Records building — one of the most stunning American public buildings I have ever seen, a masterful bit of Mediterranean architecture from the 1920s. It also happens to have a clock tower which, I understand, affords a nice view of Santa Barbara. So I went to the clock tower and… it had just closed. Thwarted again in my attempts to climb to a vista.

It’s a Faux World After All

The most direct way by car from greater Tampa to Disney World is by Interstate 4. I went that way with five other students back in ’82, and I have a couple of vague memories about that stretch of road, as it was then. Mainly, I remember long tracts of undeveloped roadside, either wooded or ranch land, which sometimes included cattle—an industry that’s still very large in Florida, but little known. I don’t remember what the traffic was like, but it couldn’t have been heavy, or I would remember it.

Twenty-three years later, there seemed to be much less open land, much more development along the way, and a lot more traffic. Miles and miles of the road were being rebuilt, widened to six lanes it looked like, and about 30 miles ahead of the Disney exits, we hit a traffic jam that added about an hour to our travels. It was, as it turned out, an omen for the day.

All the guidebooks advise preparing for the Disney parks in certain ways, but I’m not sure you can really be ready for the throngs of spring break. Lines for the rides, of course. Lines for food. Lines for the bathrooms. There were even lines to ride the tram that takes you to the lines to buy your ticket which are followed by lines to ride the monorail that takes you to the lines to go through the turnstiles.

If not the happiest place on Earth, Disney is at least one of the best organized. Exasperating as they were, all those queues were orderly, and it was mostly a good-natured crowded, unlike, say, the mobs waiting for buses in China, which likely as not would spawn fistfights the way hurricanes spawn tornadoes. I saw a couple of people screaming at their kids at Disney World—I couldn’t be completely unsympathetic to that—but that was about it.

So we rode some rides, nothing that required more than about a half hour wait. Once she learned it was a roller coaster, Lilly had no interest in the likes of Space Mountain, or even the log ride, so we mostly avoided the hour-plus lines of those amusements. People aren’t quite as willing to line up for rides like the spinning teacups, the faux Indy 500 cars, Aladdin’s “magic carpet,” the faux jungle cruise accompanied by the worst jokes in the park, the Tiki bird show (under new management! A sign said… is Disney outsourcing?), or It’s a Small World, which I’m glad to report still replies on positive stereotypes, practically every one you can think of. We did all those rides and some others.

Then there was the Pirates of the Caribbean. It had the longest line we put up with, artfully concealed from the outside by a maze of corridors done up in faux 18th-century stonework. I insisted on riding it this time. I went on it in 1973, at Disneyland; we were in the front seats, and got a little wet. I rode it again in 1982 at Disney World, and back at Disneyland in 2001 it was the first thing we rode after entering the parking at opening time, and there were no lines.

Four years ago, as I went through that ride, I came to appreciate Disney for its mechanical prowess. Whatever else you can say about it as a rapacious organization, it puts on an amazing show at a place like this—just one ride among dozens. The animatronics have to be set in motion and maintained, the lights have to work a certain way, the sound effects need to function flawlessly, the boats need to keep moving; thousands of things need to happen to take thousands of people through the ride every day. It’s hard to imagine the effort, the sheer man-hours, that go into making the thing run. Multiple that by a factor of who knows how many, and you get the whole park.

One other thing: Disney employees, probably by a combination of nature and intensive training, proved unfailingly helpful. Early in our visit, we stopped for ice cream on Main Street, and as we stood outside the shop eating it, Lilly’s scoop popped out and fell to the ground. A nearby Disney worker, Eric I think was his name, immediately came over and asked what Lilly had had, and went in the shop and got her another cone. I can’t imagine such a thing happening at Six Flags.