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My (so bad it was funny) experience on Jun Cruise, HKDL

Let me start off by saying that I'm generally fairly disappointed by the acting quality at Disney Parks in general. Albeit, the only ones I can remember are WDW and HK (the only other one I've been to is Paris, and I was far too young to remember details about actors). But my experiences on, say, the Great Movie Ride in HS, have been far from great: actors that sound bored, or just mumbling their lines. In comparison to the Jaws ride at Orlando back in the day, where I was consistently blown away by the passion of the actors on the ride.

Anyway, in Hong Kong, we have the additional issue of language barriers. When you go to queue up at Jungle Cruise, you have three queues to choose from: Cantonese, Mandarin, and English. Each queue will fill up a boat, and that boat will be the language of the queue (interestingly enough, the English queue is usually the longest, due to the locals' obsession with getting their kids to learn English at every opportunity).

Here's the problem, though: those children will learn NOTHING from this ride. The quality of acting and English was just that bad. Now you may be thinking that I'm being a bit arrogant, expecting perfect English in a Chinese city.... but, I've lived here for a year. At least half the people who live in Hong Kong are fluent in the English, and the vast majority who aren't fluent usually know enough for them to function with English customers, etc. So, when you go to a place like Disney which usually (well, so they claim) strives for "perfection", you'd expect them to pick their actors from the 98% of the population who could speak enough to function on this ride.

Well, they didn't. I've done the ride twice, on my two visits to the park. The first was hilarious. The woman would just keep repeating the same single word until we go past that scene, so "hippo, hippo, hippo, hippo", and the words weren't even always right... (gorilla = "monkey", "monkey", "monkey"... waterfall = "water", "water", "water" .... elephant = "africa, africa, africa"). She at least had a bit of energy about her.... she was speaking at about 150 words per minute, in a very high pitch voice.

The second time..... I'm sure the actor was just farting on the microphone. Not a single word was understood.

So, yeah, not a great version of the ride (though the scenes themselves, are almost identical to Orlando, iirc), just because of the actors. HKDL on the whole, btw, is a nice park. It does seem "cheaper", and it's very small, but it certainly gives off the Disney feel, a small slice of Americana... which is especially impressive, given that they've managed to do it in a park which drives most of its traffic from mainland China.
 
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