Segregation Faux-Pas at Entertainment City
Last night I went to Entertainment City for the first time with three of my friends. We of course jumped at the opportunity to get into queue for the first rollercoaster ride we stumbled upon. We went into an entrance and saw that there was no line, but realized that other people were going into another gated queue area directly next to where we had entered. I remarked to my friends that it was strange that they would have two entrances next to each other, and that one would be non-functional. So, we left where we had been waiting to go into the other waiting line. We were waiting and talking when suddenly I saw a big group go into the original entrance we had gone into.
Being a good fellow neighbor I politely informed them that the actual line was the other entrance, and the man in the group of several women and children kindly informed me that we were in the MEN ONLY section, whereas the other entrance where we had originally gone into was the FAMILY section.
This put us in a strange dilemma. I was with three male, expat friends and I was the only woman in the group. We are clearly not a family, and earlier, my friends had been recounting to me how that very day they had been kicked out of a hotel beach for not being a family--that is for being three men. How arbitrarily and quickly my three friends suddenly were able to jump to "the other side of the fence" once I was in their company. We had to exit the MEN ONLY queue and go back to the FAMILY section...me and my "three husbands" as I joked. This line flipping set us back about 20 minutes from getting on the actual ride.
For one of the rides in the amusement park, I decided to sit it out, since my motion sickness pills were slowly wearing off and this particular ride seemed like a centrifugal force vortex of vomit-inducing misery. Suddenly my three friends had to go through the MEN ONLY line, where some young Saudi vacationers, or entertainment refugees as I would more aptly put it, began to strike up a conversation with them, probably something that would never happen in the FAMILY line.
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