We may need to do more than two shots after this. (Instagram/ellavioletta/SWNS)
A theme park is a pretty strange entity, if you think about it. You drive there, wait in line to park, then wait in line to pay money to get in, where you then wait in line to be thrown around for a few minutes. That’s broken up by paying too much money to try to win a stuffed animal or paying too much money for food,
Regardless, they’re here to stay, and a generally fun way to spend a day, gripes aside. And many of the theme parks indeed have themes: Disney has (duh) Disney, Marvel, and Star Wars characters. Six Flags has Looney Tunes and DC characters. And then there’s Tuyen Lam Lake National Tourist Complex in Vietnam, which has a section devoted to COVID-19.
The pandemic park was noticed back in 2022 by UK traveler Ella Ribak, who documented it then, but interest in it was recently revived when she asked if it was still around. Visitors are greeted with a clock that serves as a grim reminder of the beginning of the 2020’s, but things quickly get more whimsical, with pathogens carrying the earth on a stretcher, pathogens locked in jails, and pathogens boxing each other, among other pathogen-centric activities.
“The clock at the start made it all feel pretty dystopian, and the fact all the sculptures were shrouded in trees,” Ribak told the South West News Service. “But then when you turned a corner and saw a human-size pathogen with googly eyes on it locked in a jail, it just becomes funny. Me and the other travelers couldn’t stop laughing and we kept looking around to see if any Vietnamese people found it funny as well, but they all seemed pretty serious.”
On the one hand, this does have a sort of precedent. That merry-go-round you gleefully rode as a child has origins as a war game. But building even a section of a park in tribute to a disease that killed nearly a quarter million people in 2022 when Ribak found it, seems like as bad as the idea of building a theme park on an island with dinosaurs on it, and we’re pretty sure that actually happened too.
It's pandemic time! (Instagram/ellavioletta/SWNS)
There’s no word so far on whether or not this park still exists, but given that there haven’t been any more global pandemics in the past two years, we doubt that it’s been replaced with anything. If they want to go back in time to add to it, we’ve got a few suggestions, however. There could be a bubonic plague section with a friendly flea mascot jumping off a rat to bite people. Or perhaps on a smaller scale, a Chicago Fire section where a careless cow kicks over a lantern to start a blaze that pretends to envelop the park. Really, the possibilities are endless, but should probably have ended before they began.
