Wrote by Tristane on Wednesday, October 31st 2007 at 12:25 pm

Last week, as is often the case you’ll say, I was at Disneyland. I was a “parkonaut”, as Almaterra would say (a reader of this blog, who dared me to use this term in an article. So, what do I win?).
With a notebook, pen, a good dose of courage and a few hours in front of me, I set out to ask some other “parkonauts” (that’s twice - do I get double the prize?) from all over the world some questions. 

First observation: even though I didn’t do too badly in Italian at
school, my Italian today is absolutely awful and must be below sea
level (I’m not exaggerating).

Second observation: my Spanish is just as bad, and my German too (but
then again, I didn’t do so well in German at school anyway!).

But even funnier, well for me anyway, is that once I’d decided that I
would just have to use French or English, I got some quite amusing
answers.

To the question: “How old do you think Disneyland Resort Paris is?” I
got, from a perfectly non-representative sample of people
(non-representative because they were just people I happened to come
across) of fifty children under seven:

- thirty-five, “euhhh” or “bah… ” or “mngmm” or even utter silence!

Followed by about ten “I don’t know” (or “dunno” or “I’m six”, which means that the child is trying to avoid the question ;-).

In the end, five children gave me the right answer. 

But, my dear Watson, all of the fifty mums of these same fifty
children, without exception, desperately tried to whisper “fifteen” to
their little angel.
And so that means that five children out of the fifty questioned have got better hearing than the others!

We can also deduce that 100% of mums know that Disneyland Resort Paris
is fifteen this year (well, once they’re in the park in any case!)