Exploring the real World Showcase

Good grief, the past couple months have flown by. We got back from our two-week stint in Asia on November 12 and after having less than 24 hours to recover from the jet lag, I was greeted by the warm embrace of my day job. The upside is that I work remotely, the downside is that it’s still work and I was greeted with some significant work-related changes upon returning to the grind. Add in the holidays and various personal obligations, family dramas, and general day-to-day life in Southern California and, well, the rest of my year ended up being a lot more hectic than I had anticipated. It’s 2018 now, though, and it’s really, finally time to start unpacking.

 

Looking back on this recent trip, it’s remarkable how much of a role Disney has played — and continues to play — in my life. It’s because of Disney that I really had much of an interest in international travel at all. That’s not to say I wouldn’t have traveled if I weren’t a Disney fan, but I don’t think I’d have sought out the places I have traveled so far. Asia probably wouldn’t have been on my short list for first international trips, especially Japan. After all, many of the usual things Americans go to Tokyo for aren’t really in my wheelhouse — I don’t watch any anime except for some of the Miyazaki films, video games tend to spike my anxiety so I just don’t play them much, and I’m not exactly the demographic for kawaii culture. It’s all interesting, of course, but not really on my radar.

 

But I have been to Epcot.

I first went to Walt Disney World when I was five — my family did an insane cross-country road trip only to spend a single day at the Magic Kingdom. My parents weren’t impressed and to this day my mom insists it was just a copy of Disneyland. Of course, it isn’t and they missed out on Epcot and Disney-MGM Studios on that first trip but I’m not surprised that uninformed lifelong Disneyland locals made such a big, silly mistake. I didn’t return to Florida until I was 18 on a trip that was effectively a high school graduation present I planned and gave to myself. I went with a couple of friends, just a week after Disneyland’s big 50th Anniversary at the end of July. Accustomed to the hot but bone-dry summers of California’s central valley where I grew up, we were woefully unprepared for Florida’s blistering hot and intensely wet summer weather. We trudged through the trip, in perpetual misery, but I still managed to walk away in love with Walt Disney World and especially Epcot.

Epcot’s World Showcase sparked something inside me that’s been burning ever since; a wonder at Disney’s ability to recreate real-world cultures and places in a theme park, something you see glimmers of at Disneyland but a concept that really comes to fruition at Walt Disney World. For me, seeing World Showcase naturally led to an interest in the real-life counterparts of Epcot’s international facsimiles. I suppose that’s largely the point of World Showcase but it seems that point can easily get lost in the boozy haze of the park’s perpetual food and wine festivals. Disney has also, in the last decade or two, perfected the art of turning their theme parks into fancy food courts and shopping malls with steep admission fees, which really does make the entire goal of World Showcase seem less about exchanging goodwill and friendship between countries and more about appropriating culture for profit. We can discuss the intentions of present-day Disney another time, but I do truly believe that the Walt Disney Company that opened EPCOT Center in the 1980s truly had aspirational and inspirational goals that are sorely missing from Disney’s current corporate culture (and America’s culture at large).

I’d never have guessed Japan would be my first big international trip but it was in the spring of 2016. We followed it up with Paris in the fall of 2016, and now Hong Kong and Tokyo again this fall. The locations of these trips aren’t by mistake. Disney Parks have been the anchors for our international trips so far, with Paris being perhaps the only city I’d have personally sought out on my own if it weren’t for Disney (I majored in art history in college, so if it hadn’t been Disneyland, it would have been the art that eventually pulled me to Paris). The Disney theme parks acting as gateways has opened me up to cities, peoples, cultures, food, and experiences that I’d probably never have experienced otherwise. Needless to say, I owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to Disney for sparking my interest in international travel. It’s because of Disney theme parks, and especially because of Epcot, international travel is something I now must have in my life and aggressively seek out.

When we first went to Tokyo in 2016, we weren’t entirely sure what to expect. Everything we read and everywhere we looked only echoed what he had heard from the small, but growing, segment of the Disney community that had made the trek out to Japan: we’d love Tokyo and instantly want to go back. I expected to enjoy the trip but thought maybe the intense praise for Tokyo was a bit hyperbolic, until I arrived. After our first full day in Japan, Nick and I agreed we’d want to return right away. For us, it was an immediate response — Tokyo was one of those places that we could just immediately sense would leave a permanent mark on us. That feeling continued to be amplified as the trip progressed and by the time we got to the Disney parks, we were absolutely permanently affected. Everything you’ve heard about Japan being amazing is true: it’s really unlike anything else and even after two trips I have a hard time finding the words to really explain why. There’s something magical there; an energy, a feeling, a tension that permeates everything that just makes the place feel so alive that the Epcot pavilion only manages to capture a tiny sliver of. It’s really remarkable how a place like Japan can be so quiet and restrained but also so vibrant and brash. In Epcot’s Japan pavilion, you wander the quiet, serene pavilion and then step into the eccentric, over-the-top Mitsukoshi department store — that tension is magnified infinitely on the streets and neighborhoods of Tokyo, in a multitude of ways. Epcot’s World Showcase pavilions are broad strokes of each of its respective countries’ cultures, peoples, and histories but that doesn’t mean they’re inaccurate or watered-down.  Disney’s WED Imagineers really did their homework when designing these spaces and it’s fascinating to see how they condensed the real world into relatively small theme park areas.

Anyway, when the opportunity arose to return to Tokyo with two of our best friends Chuck and Sally this fall, we didn’t question it. To continue to drive home Disney’s influence on my life, we met Chuck and Sally via Twitter, talking about Disney stuff and over the last few years they’ve become a couple of our best friends (thanks Disney Twitter!). Anyway, we all figured out how to make it work financially and started planning. We’ve detailed our crazy planning method in a previous post so I won’t go into it again, but think our planning worked out pretty well. Things like jet lag, sorting out a lost luggage situation, flight delays, and time getting away from us did come up and we did miss out on a few things we all wanted to see but I think we got quite a lot done. You’ll have to ask Chuck and Sally how much they wanted to murder me by the end of the trip (we did run them a little ragged) but for a two week trip, we saw a lot, ate a ton, and had a lot of laughs and a lot of fun.

I’ll end on that note for now, but in some upcoming posts, I’ll be detailing some attractions we did and experiences we did in Hong Kong and Tokyo. I know, I know, it took me how long to get this up? I promise I’ll get more out very soon!

 

Until then, we hope you all had a beautiful and peaceful holiday season and are having a good start to the new year. See you here again soon (promise)!