Today we got to spend the day visiting the Efteling Amusement Park located about an hour away from the hotel. At 9:30 am we boarded our charter bus to make our way to the park, all of us very excited to visit all of the attractions and roller coasters. Prior to leaving for the amusement park, we had some assigned reading that included a Wikipedia page with information about the attractions, their designers and the overall theme of the park. The theme of the park centers around fantasy and includes realms centers on folklore, mythology and fairy tales. It is twice as large and three years older than the Disneyland located in California.
The first thing we did immediately after they let us into the park was stop for a group photo. We have had a really hard time in the past two weeks getting a group photo where everyone is smiling and has their eyes open. With some luck and great photography skills from Scott, we got a nice group photo in front of the large fountain near the entrance to the park. During our hour long bus ride, we had planned our strategy to hit up all of the roller coasters before lunch and then explore the park and some of the other attractions after. We headed for our first stop on the list, which was the Bobsled Run coaster. The coaster was a pretty mild one, other than the fact that the track was an actual bobsled with no real tracks that the coaster was attached to.
Next, we started walking to the wooden coaster in the park that all of us were the most excited to go to. On our way, we came across a free fall coaster where they plummet you straight down into a tunnel and then as soon as you come up your twisted around upside down. Now, I like roller coasters, but I don’t love them enough to plummet straight down to the ground, so Talia and I sat it out and got a good laugh out of the reactions of everyone else who decided to give it a try. Next, we made our way to the wooden coaster that had a pretty short line. From the outside, the coaster looked pretty tame, but little did I know it had a nice drop in the middle and some very sharp turns. Perhaps the most fun about this specific coaster is that it had two cars moving side by side that raced to the end of the course where a winner was declared. Since we had learned this fact, it was obvious that we needed to split up the group, go again and have a little friendly competition to see which coaster would win.
The next stop on the list of coasters was a double loop and double twist coaster. I decided it was time for a little break, so I got a slushie and hung out at a nearby table. Part of the homework for this trip was to spend 30 minutes observing from the perspective of the “Anthropologist” innovator type. I sat at my table and started observing some of the other people who were visiting the park. The park seemed to be mainly filled with parents and their young children or young couples spending the day together. One of the things that I really noticed is that parents here in Europe don’t spend time yelling at or trying to control their children. They let them run around and just simply be kids and they overall seem to be better behaved than kids in America. Even though Efteling is filled with a lot of tourists, it is mainly tourists from other European countries. I only did this activity for 30 minutes, from what I noticed European countries have a very different idea of how to raise children and how they discipline them than a lot of America does.
Once everyone was off the coaster, we stopped for a short lunch at one of the many food shacks in the area before heading out to explore the park. We walked through the fairy tale themed realm to head towards an indoor ride that is supposed to take you through a forbidden city. We had a short wait in line before we entered our boat and floated into the attraction. The first two rooms were filled with lights and flowers, vines, trees and snakes. The third room and the duration of the ride was filled with Moroccans painted to be dirty beggars living on the outskirts of the forbidden city. Sometimes racism is subtle, but on this ride it certainly was not.
At some point during the ride, there is a camera that takes a photo of the group in the boat. In our photo, every single one of us was either stone faced or looking appalled, and Jack at that point had his head in his hands. Prior to going to the park, many of us knew that this ride was controversial, but none of us realized just how bad it would be. The Dutch have a long history of disliking Moroccans and there is still a lot of racist rhetoric towards this group of people in the Netherlands. Later in the day, we were talking to someone who works at the hotel who is a native Dutch person, and he knew that to some degree it was insensitive, but didn’t really have a grasp on why other cultures and countries describe it as blatantly racist.
After discussing the ride for about 30 minutes, he agreed that it is something that the amusement park should renovate and move away from depicting Moroccans at all.
After that ride, we took a break for some water and to talk about what we had just seen. After sufficiently venting our feelings about the forbidden city ride, we began walking towards the Madhouse attraction and the dark roller coaster. On our walk, Jack and I both noticed that the carnival themed area we were walking through was also filled with racist depictions of African and Asians. Out of curiosity, I searched for a little more information on the amusement park’s history with racially insensitive and racist depictions. I found that this carnival area had actually already been remodeled after intense pressure from tourists visiting the park for the way they were depicting these traditionally marginalized communities. Obviously, to us the racist depictions were still noticeable despite the remodel, so I would say Efteling still has a long way to go in removing these depictions.