So on a 2011 trip to Paris I persuaded my partner, Joe, to skip Sacré-Coeur and instead go to Marne-la-Vallée, a suburb of Paris where two Disney parks now sprawl across former sugar beet fields. I wanted to see if Buzz Lightyear had really learned to blast off with a proper French accent.

The place certainly smelled French. Arriving around lunchtime, we decided to have a glass of Champagne at the ornate Disneyland Hotel, which is perched near the park gates like a pink and white Victorian bauble. Lovely. But the interior smelled as if it had been hosed down with Jean Patou perfume. “I think I’m getting a chemical burn inside my nose,” I whispered to Joe, who rolled his eyes. (A Disney spokeswoman said the hotel no longer uses that scent.)

We were slack-jawed upon entering the main park. To compete with the splendor of Paris, Disney spent lavishly to open the resort in 1992, and its ornate landscaping has only improved with age: Austrian black pines, endless rhododendrons, pathways that hug serpentine streams. Of all the Disney castles, the one here is the most extravagant. “Even I thought that was pretty cool,” a normally nonplused Joe said after a peek at an animatronic dragon residing in the dungeon.

There was a lot of familiar Disney iconography that wasn’t particularly adapted for Europe, from Frontierland to Main Street U.S.A. But there were also some wonderfully unique newer attractions, like Crush’s Coaster, an indoor-outdoor “Finding Nemo” -themed thrill ride with spinning cars. Another first-of-its-kind offering, Remy’s Totally Zany Adventure, themed after Pixar’s Paris-set “Ratatouille,” opened here in July. (Riders are “shrunk” to the size of rats and sent on a 3-D chase through Gusteau’s restaurant.)

As Joe sipped a beer in Fantasyland — alcohol was initially banned, in keeping with Disney’s practice elsewhere, but the French recoiled and Disney relented — I began to wonder about the company’s newest park, Hong Kong Disneyland. I associated it with a cultural misfire: A few months after it opened in 2005, a miscalculation during the Chinese New Year led to an overcrowding debacle. But maybe that was an isolated incident. Hmm.

“Don’t even think about it,” Joe said.

I hauled him to Hong Kong Disneyland by way of Tokyo Disneyland. At the end of a long trip to Japan last fall, I slipped in a day at the seaside Tokyo Disney Resort, which comprises two parks and a half-dozen hotels connected by a monorail. The excursion turned out to be a surprise highlight of our time in Tokyo.

Along with that popcorn — other flavors include soy sauce and curry — we stuffed ourselves with chocolate “Toy Story"-themed mochi dumplings. The gift shops overflowed with oddball items you would never find in Orlando, making shopping a delight. (There are apparently a lot of adult men in Japan wearing Winnie the Pooh boxer briefs.) And one of the two parks, Tokyo DisneySea, offered a parade-on-water called Legend of Mythica that left us speechless: fireworks, dancing fountains, lasers calibrated to thundering music, acrobats, a Jet Ski ballet, floats with massive motorized serpents and griffins.