101 Places Not to See Before You Die - Catherine Price [3]
Before you have a moment to actually calculate the odds of this happening coincidentally, the man has escorted you off to the side of the passageway where, with a flourish, he rids your shoe of the offending turd. Then, as you reach into your wallet for a tip, he announces the price for a shit-shine special—and it’s more than most New Delhi residents earn in a week.
If you think about it, the scam is brilliant. The service has already been rendered, and besides, who wants to walk around with a turd perched on his shoe?
So you pay him—not his asking price, but still enough to make it worth his while to continue smearing poop on the footwear of passersby. If you’re a victim, feel free to get pissed off. But at least the shit scheme isn’t as bad as the loogie-on-your-shoulder trick. In that one, you don’t even have the chance to give a tip—someone smears a wad of spit on your jacket while a second guy steals your wallet.
Chapter 3
Euro Disney
I’ve never liked Disney World. As a child who was terrified of mimes, Santa Claus, and any larger-than-life stuffed animal, I hated the giant mice that roamed the streets of the Magic Kingdom, holding children hostage until their parents took a photograph. Huge, unblinking eyes; garish smiles; swollen, cartoon hands—this was the stuff of nightmares. When my parents brought me to a special event called “Breakfast with the Characters,” I took one look at Pinocchio and dove under the table.
So perhaps I was biased against Euro Disney from the start. But really, who wasn’t? Opened in 1992, it was an attempt to bring Mickey Mouse to Europeans—an audience that tends to be skeptical of American culture to begin with, especially when it tries to steal the hearts and minds of its children. Convinced that parental disapproval was no match for their offspring’s love of The Little Mermaid, Disney pushed forward with its plans and eventually settled on a spot in the rural town of Marne-la-Vallée. An easy train ride from Paris, the location was estimated to be less than a four-hour drive for sixty-eight million people.
Controversy soon followed. Assuming that there must be a direct connection between Euro Disney and the U.S. government, French farmers blockaded its entrance with their tractors to protest European and American agricultural policies. A Parisian stage director named Ariane Mnouchkine called Euro Disney a “cultural Chernobyl,” and while she quickly moved on to making other exaggerated comparisons to nuclear disasters (“Television seems to me to be a much more menacing cultural Chernobyl,” she told the New York Times in July 1993), the classification stuck.
And then there were tactical errors: Euro Disney opened, for example, in the middle of a European recession. It offended would-be workers with a strict dress code forbidding long nails and requiring “appropriate undergarments” for women, which prompts the question of why a Disney employee would be showing her undergarments to begin with. As a primarily outdoor attraction, it didn’t take into account the fact that France, unlike Florida and Southern California, actually has a winter. The restaurants in the park also didn’t serve alcohol, a policy that didn’t go over well with Europeans used to enjoying a glass of wine with lunch. By July 1993—a little over a year after the park opened—Euro Disney had debts of about $3.7 billion.
Wikipedia Commons
But despite the challenges of translating Americana into every European language (in Italian, Cattleman’s Chili is Pepperoncino alla Cowboy) Euro Disney kept fighting. The park posted its first profits in 1995 and has done so intermittently since then. Scarred by the negative connotations of “Euro Disney,” it also changed its name to “Disneyland Paris.” Former Disney CEO Michael Eisner says this title