July in Hong Kong means heat and humidity. It's the best month to get out of Hong Kong if you can. My wife and kids did exactly that recently, heading back to the cooler climes of Melbourne for a few weeks.
While they were away, I entertained myself in a number of ways - television, video games, enjoying reading the Sunday newspaper without a 1 year old slapping me across the head. One Sunday morning, I went to Hong Kong Disneyland. Without my kids. You probably think I'm strange now. This is where I try to justify that decision in 500 words or less.
Firstly let me say that I was by no means Robinson Crusoe in being at Disneyland without kids. The majority of people there on an average day do not appear to be accompanied by children (although it is possible they arrived with children and have simply left them having a tantrum in the line for the Slinky Dog ride, as I have been tempted to do). Chinese culture appears to have a love for Mickey Mouse and other Disney characters as one of its central tenets, so to require people to have kids before they can, say, get their photograph taken with Buzz Lightyear would be unnecessarily cruel.
I did have a reason of sorts for going to Disneyland. We have just bought a car, and I had been charged with picking up my family from the airport when they returned. Hong Kong roads are a treacherous series of motorways, interchanges, tunnels and bridges designed to overload the senses and lead the uninitated astray. I have driven to Sha Tin twice since I got the car, and never intended to go there once. So I needed to take a test drive to the airport. Disneyland is just before the airport and my yearly pass gets me free parking, so it seemed a more fun destination for my test run.
Fair enough, you say, but a test drive would merely require me to find the airport/Disneyland. It does not require me to stop, or indeed to get out of my car and go into Disneyland.
You are correct. It does not. But I have yet to tell you about Buzz Lightyear Astro Blasters.
Buzz Lightyear Astro Blasters is basically a laser gun shooting gallery. You get in a little pod mounted on a conveyor belt, and you get taken through an alien landscape which is full of targets to hit with your laser gun. You can rotate the pod using a joystick. Your dashboard has a display which shows your score.
Astro Blasters is my sons' favourite ride at Disneyland because they like shooting things (we do not encourage this but it seems to be coded into the DNA of small boys) and they worship Buzz Lightyear. It is my favourite ride at Disneyland because it rarely has a queue and is airconditioned. The boys and I can get through it 6 or 7 times in the half an hour we would spend in line at a lot of other rides, and during that time no-one complains about being thirsty or hungry or that they didn't get as much popcorn as their brother.
The only problem with Astro Blasters is that the kids cannot ride alone. We all have to squeeze into one pod, and the pod is only equipped with two laser guns. This means Dad gets to sit in the middle and do nothing. Actually that is not quite true, I get to steer the pod, but on your sixth trip through in half an hour, that starts to wear thin. The boys are having far too much fun to allow their father to have a go on the guns, and this is fair enough. Even with my own limited parenting skills I can appreciate that being a Dad sometimes means sacrificing your own fun for the sake of your kids. Even when you are sure you could rack up a pretty good score, given that your many trips through the ride have allowed you to memorise where all the high scoring targets are.
On one occasion, my 5 year old had a flash of generosity and decided to give me a turn on the guns, given that he had just had 7 in a row. He would steer. Unfortunately, this meant that he just jammed the joystick hard to the left and we spun in circles the entire ride, making it impossible to hit anything and making me vaguely ill. He thought it was hilarious. It was this incident that finally made me accept that I was destined never to test my potential in the Astro Blaster arena, and I would be forever left wondering whether I could have achieved the rank of Galactic Hero.
Until, that is, I realised that I needed to do that test drive. I parked the car, headed straight for the front gates and then Astro Blasters. My first run was a warm up - good but not spectacular. On the second run, the ride temporarily paused in front of one of the higher-value targets, and I hammered it for all it was worth. I scored 734,000, enough for Level 6 - Cosmic Commando. I could have gone back and tried for the high-score (the score display only goes to 999,999) but I suspected that I was probably already well past the point where a bit of fun becomes a pathological obsession (although you may reasonably consider that I left that point in my wake some time ago) and decided to leave it there. I headed back for the car park, stopping only for a Mickey Mouse-shaped ice cream (hey, it was hot) and reflected on a mission accomplished.
While they were away, I entertained myself in a number of ways - television, video games, enjoying reading the Sunday newspaper without a 1 year old slapping me across the head. One Sunday morning, I went to Hong Kong Disneyland. Without my kids. You probably think I'm strange now. This is where I try to justify that decision in 500 words or less.
Firstly let me say that I was by no means Robinson Crusoe in being at Disneyland without kids. The majority of people there on an average day do not appear to be accompanied by children (although it is possible they arrived with children and have simply left them having a tantrum in the line for the Slinky Dog ride, as I have been tempted to do). Chinese culture appears to have a love for Mickey Mouse and other Disney characters as one of its central tenets, so to require people to have kids before they can, say, get their photograph taken with Buzz Lightyear would be unnecessarily cruel.
I did have a reason of sorts for going to Disneyland. We have just bought a car, and I had been charged with picking up my family from the airport when they returned. Hong Kong roads are a treacherous series of motorways, interchanges, tunnels and bridges designed to overload the senses and lead the uninitated astray. I have driven to Sha Tin twice since I got the car, and never intended to go there once. So I needed to take a test drive to the airport. Disneyland is just before the airport and my yearly pass gets me free parking, so it seemed a more fun destination for my test run.
Fair enough, you say, but a test drive would merely require me to find the airport/Disneyland. It does not require me to stop, or indeed to get out of my car and go into Disneyland.
You are correct. It does not. But I have yet to tell you about Buzz Lightyear Astro Blasters.
Buzz Lightyear Astro Blasters is basically a laser gun shooting gallery. You get in a little pod mounted on a conveyor belt, and you get taken through an alien landscape which is full of targets to hit with your laser gun. You can rotate the pod using a joystick. Your dashboard has a display which shows your score.
Astro Blasters is my sons' favourite ride at Disneyland because they like shooting things (we do not encourage this but it seems to be coded into the DNA of small boys) and they worship Buzz Lightyear. It is my favourite ride at Disneyland because it rarely has a queue and is airconditioned. The boys and I can get through it 6 or 7 times in the half an hour we would spend in line at a lot of other rides, and during that time no-one complains about being thirsty or hungry or that they didn't get as much popcorn as their brother.
The only problem with Astro Blasters is that the kids cannot ride alone. We all have to squeeze into one pod, and the pod is only equipped with two laser guns. This means Dad gets to sit in the middle and do nothing. Actually that is not quite true, I get to steer the pod, but on your sixth trip through in half an hour, that starts to wear thin. The boys are having far too much fun to allow their father to have a go on the guns, and this is fair enough. Even with my own limited parenting skills I can appreciate that being a Dad sometimes means sacrificing your own fun for the sake of your kids. Even when you are sure you could rack up a pretty good score, given that your many trips through the ride have allowed you to memorise where all the high scoring targets are.
On one occasion, my 5 year old had a flash of generosity and decided to give me a turn on the guns, given that he had just had 7 in a row. He would steer. Unfortunately, this meant that he just jammed the joystick hard to the left and we spun in circles the entire ride, making it impossible to hit anything and making me vaguely ill. He thought it was hilarious. It was this incident that finally made me accept that I was destined never to test my potential in the Astro Blaster arena, and I would be forever left wondering whether I could have achieved the rank of Galactic Hero.
Until, that is, I realised that I needed to do that test drive. I parked the car, headed straight for the front gates and then Astro Blasters. My first run was a warm up - good but not spectacular. On the second run, the ride temporarily paused in front of one of the higher-value targets, and I hammered it for all it was worth. I scored 734,000, enough for Level 6 - Cosmic Commando. I could have gone back and tried for the high-score (the score display only goes to 999,999) but I suspected that I was probably already well past the point where a bit of fun becomes a pathological obsession (although you may reasonably consider that I left that point in my wake some time ago) and decided to leave it there. I headed back for the car park, stopping only for a Mickey Mouse-shaped ice cream (hey, it was hot) and reflected on a mission accomplished.
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