Good Intentions

Our tuna-can city accommodated 2.07 million visitors this past July—the month traditionally known as low tourism season. Now, if 9 million people can fit comfortably on a dot on the map, why can’t 29,000 lab mice fit in Disneyland?

Call me a pessimist, but Hong Kong Disneyland screams disaster to me. Two-hour waits for rides is nothing new for any decent theme park, but quarrel-inducing circular queues for cha-siu burgers, which I heard are rather dry despite having Lee Kum Kee as the park’s official sauce sponsor, will take longer than four weeks’ rehearsal for our city to get used to.

According to Henry Tang, Sunday’s overflow of visitors was a deliberate arrangement to test the threshold of the park’s capacity. Officials are suggesting all kinds of solution to the potential overflow of visitors; the most heard one being “we could always add more facilities”. But before that happens, visitors are urged to:

1. Commute by public transportation, because the parking lot has been proven to fill up in precisely eight-and-a-half minutes upon the opening of the gates. Though, the MTR Disneyland Resort Line, with Mickey-shaped windows that don’t open, is to be steered clear of by the claustrophobic.

2. Start their Disney adventure earlier in the day; spend their first bucket of gold on a late breakfast in one of the nine restaurants in the park so they won’t be hungry anytime near the restaurants’ busiest hours.

3. Similarly, have dinner before 5:30pm and get the hell out of there before peak hour hits.

30% of the lab mice polled said Hong Kong Disneyland, which is due to open officially in five days, is not worth a second visit. It’s magic, alright.

Now let’s not be so harsh. Really, how could we expect to pack 30,000 people in a park when it takes 14 bits of packaging to hold a box of mooncake?

In less than two weeks, 3 million empty mooncake boxes and tins, weighing some 750 tonnes, will be discarded in our tuna can. Here's a suggestion to the Home Affairs Bureau: A few hundred thousand of these mooncake boxes which, once emptied out, conveniently turn into storage containers treasured by most elderly people, can be distributed as concession prizes to those grammas who are not given good-fortune rice despite after spending hours in quarrel-inducing circular queues during the Hungry Ghosts Festival.