Every Parisian parent knows it.
The proof of the swindle stares us in the face every time we open the junk drawer and notice, once again, the fluorescent plastic tickets languishing in there among dead double-A batteries, a rainbow array of rubber bands, and keys to doors which were put out onto the sidewalk for trash collection two renovations ago.
These brightly colored tickets, and even the cartes de fidelité – loyalty cards – belie one of the city’s most pervasive scams: the Parisian merry-go-round.
As parents, we know that we’ll probably be stuck with these tickets forever, that they’ll even outlast the window of time when our children are still small enough to enjoy the rides they afford.
Like most Parisian kids in search of a sense of adventure and endless possibilities, my children have always loved merry-go-rounds. And in a country which prizes conformity and rules – or at least the ones that apply to everyone else, because the French seem to love nothing more than flouting authority – children on merry-go-rounds are allowed to dream big.
Kids can, in the space of 3-minute ride, feel the importance of racing to fight a fire, sirens wailing, or experience the dizzying thrill of rising upwards and piloting a helicopter. In the more classic iterations of the ride, children can fulfill the dream of becoming a knight or a princess on a majestic (yet docile and thus entirely safe) horse, or in the current versions, they can spin through space inside a colorful capsule.
According to the Musée des Arts Forains in Paris, the merry-go-round is a child’s first sampling of grown-up adventure. The parent gives their child a ticket so they can hand it off to the operator, thereby paying for the ride themself.
It’s also the first tantalizing taste of freedom from parents, who disappear as the carousel turns – scary! – and then reassuringly come back into view, a toddler’s version of the peek-a-boo game they first learned as babies.
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