Unbelievably Real
Orlando runs this tourism advertising campaign with a slogan that says, "Orlando! Unbelievably real!" and I think that ranks among the funniest things ever to have come out in advertising. Orlando understands its main criticism is that it's a Disneyfied version of a city, a fake city made of Styrofoam blocks laid down over the last forty years with no culture or history other than "Walt Disney thought the sinkhole lakes were pretty," so they try to fight it with a line straight out of the cartoon version of Pinocchio ... "I'm a REAL boy!"
We saw the real Orlando after we checked into our hotel across the boulevard from Sea World and went to dinner in a zone of chain restaurants from other places. We passed by this real Orlando Boston lobster shack with its giant lobster cars and ate at a make-believe Caribbean shack. I got some rice dish that came in a pineapple. We followed the tradition we'd established this trip and ordered Key lime pies to go, and they gave us thawed Marie Calendar pies topped with merengue manufactured a year ago by a machine in Des Moines.
For what it's worth, there is supposedly an actual downtown to Orlando, but I wasn't interested enough in proving or disproving a point about American culture to go looking for it. I do know there is at least one "real"esque kind of thing in Orlando, though it's still an Orlando kind of "real." It's just Orlando "real" from seven decades ago. We'll start exploring that tomorrow, and that will go on for days.
In the mean time, this concludes Day 8 of our 12-day trip. I promise, we're getting there.
Unbelievably Real
Orlando runs this tourism advertising campaign with a slogan that says, "Orlando! Unbelievably real!" and I think that ranks among the funniest things ever to have come out in advertising. Orlando understands its main criticism is that it's a Disneyfied version of a city, a fake city made of Styrofoam blocks laid down over the last forty years with no culture or history other than "Walt Disney thought the sinkhole lakes were pretty," so they try to fight it with a line straight out of the cartoon version of Pinocchio ... "I'm a REAL boy!"
We saw the real Orlando after we checked into our hotel across the boulevard from Sea World and went to dinner in a zone of chain restaurants from other places. We passed by this real Orlando Boston lobster shack with its giant lobster cars and ate at a make-believe Caribbean shack. I got some rice dish that came in a pineapple. We followed the tradition we'd established this trip and ordered Key lime pies to go, and they gave us thawed Marie Calendar pies topped with merengue manufactured a year ago by a machine in Des Moines.
For what it's worth, there is supposedly an actual downtown to Orlando, but I wasn't interested enough in proving or disproving a point about American culture to go looking for it. I do know there is at least one "real"esque kind of thing in Orlando, though it's still an Orlando kind of "real." It's just Orlando "real" from seven decades ago. We'll start exploring that tomorrow, and that will go on for days.
In the mean time, this concludes Day 8 of our 12-day trip. I promise, we're getting there.