Theme Parks

25-11-23 00 / episode: 313

What do I Love About Them?

Ever since I was a kid I always loved theme parks.

Disneyland was the classic theme park in my mind.

I was always happy to go to just about any other theme park if it was a real theme park in my image.

When I look back at the theme parks that I've been to, I've always had a lot of fun and I love them.

I was starting to think what it was that made them so special.

When I walked into Disneyland I felt like I was in another world.

I thought, "What is it about this world that's different that I like so much?"

Introduction

Hi and welcome to the Les Perras podcast for extensive English listening.

These podcasts are great for listening to a wide variety of vocabulary.

Today you're listening to episode 313 and it's about Theme Parks.

Clean

Then it hit me: it was the cleanliness and the bright colours.

There wasn't a lot of sloppiness.

There wasn't a lot of crowding of stuff.

Everything was clean.

The paint was not chipped, and it was bright and generally happy.

The scary attractions were scary but they were a clean scary.

Of course there was also the stress free aspect of the parks.

Except for buying food you were stress-free inside the park because you pay once and you don't have to pay more.

You can carry your bag around with you so you don't have to worry about that.

All you have to do is walk to the next attraction, line up, and ride it.

There are plenty of places to put your garbage and plenty of places to sit down.

These parks are stress-free.

Anticipation

I also like anticipation.

I look forward to the ride,

I imagine riding it when I'm lined up on it and that anticipation makes me happy and excited.

I feel the same thing about mountain climbing, which is one of the reasons why I like climbing so much.

Anticipation is a big part of things.

What do I Hate About Them?

On the other hand I also hate theme parks.

I don't like people who express their love for theme parks because it seems so shallow to me.

I think all they want is titillation in life.

They want to be excited, they want to be made happy, and they want everything in their environment to serve them.

It seems so cheap and meaningless.

In addition to that, the theme parks are fake.

They don't really represent the real world.

In fact they represent the opposite of the real world.

The theme park is the ultimate escape from the real world.

It's designed to make you feel good, which is quite a bit different from the real world.

I also don't like the fact that they're grossly unfair.

If you have money you can go.

If you don't have money you can't go.

Now that opens up a whole new can of worms but let's put the can of worms on the side.

Some people have money, and some don't.

If you have money you, can go to the theme park, and if you don't have money you can't go to the theme park.

That's not fair.

That's why I like nature.

Nature is always free.

Japanese Theme Parks

I must confess I have a certain ambivalence towards the Japanese theme parks which you can't find outside of Japan.

There are the big-name theme parks like Disneyland and Universal Studios Japan.

But I'm not calling these Japanese theme parks.

They're big company theme parks.

The Japanese theme parks are designed by Japanese for Japanese and they're only found in Japan.

I find them to be a little bit shallow like the other theme parks, but a little bit cheaper.

There aren't as many attractions.

The attractions are a little bit lower quality.

There's lots of food for sale in them, but I'm less attracted to that food, and that's probably because I'm not Japanese.

I also don't care much for the souvenirs they have, because it's usually food, and it's usually highly packaged.

I feel like I'm paying more for the packaging than I am for the food.

On the other hand I do enjoy these parks quite a bit, because they're less crowded, in a sense more relaxed and authentic.

What I mean by authentic is you can feel the personality of the person who designed the theme park.

It's not a corporate thing, it's a personal thing, and it carries that kind of charm.

In another life I'd like to make my own theme park.

I like building and creating.

My Lego creations when I was a child were fantastic in my own mind.

My Minecraft creations in the Minecraft world are fantastic in my own mind.

And if I had the time and resources I would love to make a theme park for real.

Of course it would be an escape place, but it would be an extension of my vision and it would be fun to go through it and enjoy that kind of a park.

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