around the world in four hours

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– visiting the disney world resort in orlando, florida
(many more commented pictures on my flickr account)

recently i got a chance to see mickey, metaphorically.

because of a conference we drove down to orlando, florida, where one of disney's sprawling theme parks is has claimed part of the earth.

the conference hotel turned out to be a disney resort hotel, so visiting one of the epitomes of american pop culture became a must.

among the many theme parks including animal kingdom, magic kingdom, and hollywood studios we chose epcot. epcot didn't mean anything to me but my disney-savvy travel companions were throwing around words such as world show case, rides, test tracks, spaceship earth, monorail and other attractions as regular vocabulary.

quickly i learnt that epcot is the theme park in which disney attempted to build a mini world.
it's trying hard to induce authenticity into its commercial stereotypes of asia (japan & china), the u.s favorites in europe including italy, france, great britain, and germany with the odd one out, Norway. of course a token african nation (morocco) needed to be included as well as the token latin american nation and u.s. neighbor mexico. not to upset the only other u.s. neighbor, canada was featured, too. oh, and of course no world is complete without the United States, which we skipped due to felt redundancy.

as a german i had to inspect and reconfirm the u.s. stereotype of my home county.

so this is how germany is supposed to look like.

as always germany translates into bavaria in u.s. minds symbolized by castles with turrets, wood frame houses, oktoberfest, lederhosen, meat, beer, huge beer mugs, kuckucksuhr, and obviously a range of chocolate that was based in switzerland and austria and is now owned by u.s. companies.

bavaria is the texas of germany.

it was its own kingdom (like many other german regions), wanted to secede, and still doesn't want to belong to rest of germany. in return in german stereotypes, bavaria is perceived to be extra: extra expensive to live in, extra picky in the high school diplomas recognized from fellow german states (there are 16 in total by the way), extra smart, extra low in unemployment, extra strong in economy, extra posh. in one word "extrawurst", as we say in german.

no wonder bavaria is the epitome of germany for most u.s. americans of whom the most I've met have been to west germany only, preferably the southern and rhine regions. they easily tick of names such as munich, frankfurt (main), occasionally hamburg or smaller cities like cologne or something ending in -burg or -berg (often freiburg, heidelberg).

weimar, leipzig, dresden, the lake landscape of mecklenburg-vorpommern, schwerin, potsdam, or even berlin usually are missing from the mental map. no wonder, they are in east germany.

apart from mocking the chain of souvenir shops disguised as different countries we had a good time as you can see on the commented photos on my flickr account.