FROM: Mouse of Zen Monday Published Mondays

Haiku: Epcot April #4

In Epcot, as in all the Disney parks, there are quiet little hideaways, nooks of little noise, where you can escape the happy crowds and take a moment to get your magic back. This isn't about those nooks. It's about Vikings! Vikings seeking a lost ship...

- by JB Conway, April 25, 2011

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Is there any 'real man' who doesn't like Vikings? All that pillaging and looting and mead-drinking from the skulls of one's foes. I'm rocking back and forth and singing a sea chanty right now...

The Norway Pavilion at Epcot relies heavily on Vikings for appeal. The movie they guilt you into watching after Maelstrom features ferocious Vikings, and if you walk into the Stave Church, you'll see life-size replicas of famous Norwegians, including the Viking raider Rognvald, who terrorized the French coast.

But what about the Viking ship JB mentions in his haiku?

The ship, once a play-area for children, was removed from the pavilion in 2008 and replaced with... a flower garden.

Do you hear that? It's the snarls of spirit Vikings enraged by what Disney has done.

A flower garden? Where once Vikings sailed?

Put that out of your mind and fill it instead with the images of JB's haiku, and hope that someday the Viking ship does return.

By the way, if you haven't bought JB's book, Mouse of Zen, and yet you come here each week to read his haikus, why do you torture yourself? Are you a masochist? (Or maybe a mouseochist?) Don't you know you can get all the haikus at once? In the book!

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