Hong Kong 1.0 - Disneyland!

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Hello.

Today we went to Disneyland!

This is important for a number of reasons, which I shall enumerate thusly.


• It's Disneyland
• We found our way there alone without Kate and Lloyd
• It's Disneyland!


It was really cool. I thought I would like it, but was mostly doing it for the kids, but then I got on the train with Mickey Mouse windows, and there were bronze statues of Snow White and Donald Duck and Jimmy Cricket behind little perspex screens, and I found myself all giddy with excitement even before we arrived. Navigating the metro system in Hong Kong is, full disclosure, not a difficult thing. It all makes sense, everything is in English, the trains come every couple of minutes, there's not a lot to get wrong. But even so, we made it without error so that is an accomplishment. I'm claiming it.

The kids really loved it, even more than I expected. Ivy just about exploded when we finally got into the park (there's a pretty big walk from the metro gates to the actual park entry, but it's got Disney music playing all the way and you're walking up to a massive fountain with Mickey surfing on top of a whale so it's not so bad), because she saw Mickey and Minnie mouse and when Minnie waved and blew her a kiss she couldn't believe it. Same with the parades, when the Disney Princesses came through on the first parade Snow White and Belle both waved at Ivy and blew her a kiss and she's been telling everybody now that Belle is her friend. It was pretty cute.

Liam and Sue went on a ride in Tomorrowland, Ivy and I were going to go on it but she cracked it and wanted to find Elastigirl, so we wandered around for 45 minutes trying to see if we could find her but she wasn't anywhere. Not to worry. Liam says he liked the ride after he got used to the fact that it goes up and down, I think it freaked him out a bit to start off with but he promises that he liked it.

A bit more of a walk after the Parade and we got to the 'It's a Small World, After All' ride. I thought it was going to be really really awful but it was really sweet, and really well done too, if it wasn't for the fact that Sue and I kept on singing the song for the rest of the day and driving ourselves crazy, it would have been perfect. But it's cute and harmless and the kids loved it too so it's a big win. Then some ice creams that went everywhere. Oh, there's some weird people around too. We were eating our ice creams out in front of the ride just after we'd gotten off, and there was a girl there with her boyfriend who was posing for a picture in some Mickey Mouse ears. Each time her poor boyfriend would take a picture she would look at it, berate him, then go back to her mark and strike a pose again. I'm not exaggerating, this happened at least 5 times, back and forward, berate, resume, repeat...I was going to take a video but it seemed to be not an entirely normal thing to do.

Toy Story Land next, all the rides had massive queues though so we didn't get on any, they seem weirdly grown up too, I don't think Ivy or Liam would have liked any of them (and I was definitely too cowardly) anyway. But we did get a few gifts from the gift shop there and the kids got to pose with Jessie from Toy Story for a photo - Ivy was super excited about it the whole time we were lining up, and even for months before we got here she was talking about how much she wanted to see Jessie, but then when the actual moment came, she freaked out. Poor little thing! Also, I sort of realised a bit late that I was posing with soldiers!

Next land was Mystic Point. They have a ride there called Mystic Manor and it's the best thing ever. And I'd been looking at it for months and I was really excited about going on it. So we lined up for 45 minutes, and I kept talking it up to the kids and they were all excited, and then about 5 seconds in they realised it was scary and Liam just tucked his head into Sue's shoulder and didn't look at a thing and Ivy screamed and screamed about how the monkey was scary through the whole ride and for a few minutes after too. Poor Liam broke out in tears afterwards too, but one good thing, when somebody looks a bit sad all the staff come running with stickers so we ended up with a bunch of stickers from the day at least! The ride is super cool though, and since the Chinese don't like ghosts and that sort of stuff, the ride isn't a haunted house, so not dodgy.

Slightly dodgy though, because it's October the park was Halloween themed, and since we really didn't want to watch all that garbage, there were a few things we missed, but turns out that doesn't matter too much because while everybody is watching parades and stuff, the rest of the park gets less crowded. It wasn't too crowded anyway, even though there were a lot of people there.

So essentially what I'm saying is that Disneyland is stupidly cool.

Afterwards we got taken to a burger restaurant and had a couple of drinks and a brilliant burger, then we dragged ourselves home and slept. So this blog is a little late. I should be writing tomorrow's blog now.

I think that's about it for the day, it was awesome. Last day in Hong Kong tomorrow so we're going to make it count, I really love this city.

OK, that's it :-)

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Photos

Sunset over the castle
Pollution makes things beautiful

The Queue for Liam's first Ride
In just a few minutes, he'd be freaking out

Liam's first ride
In just a few seconds, he'd be freaking out

It's a Small World After All
Lining up for the boat

Jessie
Ivy's expectation exceeded her reality. Liam was stoked though!