Disneyland Paris is a strange place - not quite a little piece of America overseas, not quite part of the France that surrounds it. Planned in the mid-eighties, and originally intended to be located in Alicante, Spain, the resort is nevertheless the single most popular tourist attraction in Europe.
It didn't always look as if things were going to work out that way. The late eighties and early nineties were the time of the infamous "Disney Wars", when competing factions battled for control of the company. One group that broke off from Disney during this period went on to form the production company Dreamworks. The deserted fairytale city of Duloc in the Dreamworks animated movie Shrek is taken by some to be a parody of Disneyland Paris, which was at that time struggling for to get people through the gates.
(The chief villain in Shrek, the diminutive Lord Farquaad, is also supposed by some to be a parody of Michael Eisner, the Disney CEO who presided over the Dreamworks split. But that's another story.)
Apart from the multilingual signs (like, multi-multilingual - not just English and Spanish like in the States - you might be forgiven for thinking you were in Disneyland Florida. Well, when the weather's good, anyway. The usual guys with plastic heads are all there, as are they fairground rides and restaurants. Just like the rest of squeaky-clean, family friendly Disney, it's impossible to get a beer anywhere - you have to leave the resort on a pass-ticket and walk half a mile to Planet Hollywood outside the gates, where a glum French waiter will charge you really quite a lot of dollars for a bottle of Bud.
No matter how the adults might feel, kids, of course, love the place. And why shouldn't they? The whole Disney dream, of course, was designed with them in mind. There are the usual Disney parades and live music, and Disney seem to have pulled off the minor miracle of persuading French wage slaves (sorry, "cast members") to deliver something approaching reasonable customer service - witnessing that is almost worth a hot afternoon without a cold beer. Almost.