Advertisement
Published: April 18th 2009
Edit Blog Post
First night in Mexico!
Straight off the plane and into the main square, mum and dad were champs. Happy Easter everyone!! I hope it all went as well for you as it did for mum, dad and I. It literally went by in seconds. unfortunately I only had two weeks to play with for easter, so Mum and Dad arranged for a week i Mexico (Guadalajara and Mexico City) and a week back in childhood at Disney World in Florida.
Mum and Dad arrived at about 8pm on Palm Sunday, surprising not as jetlagged as I thought they might be. They were on the go enough for us to have dinner with Katherine and her mother while they were still in town which was cool. I had arranged to stay in the hotel with them and it all went well with mum and I in one double bed, and poor dad regulated to the other. I spent the next day and a half showing the folks around my neighbourhood, the centre of the city, and some of the other cool places about town. They were good sports and let me take them to all kinds of restaurants and taco stands to experience the "full range" of mexican cuisine! I'm pretty sure they liked Guadalajara, although I did have
to go a little slower for dad who is still recovering from Whooping Cough and a virus and general ill health for the past five weeks.
We'd also managed to fit some of my stuff into their bags to ferry home for me, so while I had my nice little backpack mum and dad had these bohemuth suitcases fit to burst. We arrived laden down in Mexico City where I'd booked us into a hotel right smack bang in the centre. First order of business was the red double decker tour bus that took us around the sites and you got headphones, multiple language explanations and everything! I enjoyed playing the tourist again. And don't be fooled, these buses were absolutely PACKED with tourists. Since we had arrived in time for Easter there were still quite a few people in the city, markets set up in the zocalo (central square) and indigenous dances as well as traditional catholic rituals in the Cathedral. I was pretty blown away by all the religious ceremony and the sheer number of people involved to be honest, it just doesn't happen that way at home (at least not to my knowledge).
Mum and
Dad particularly enjoyed the two days it took to get round the Museum of anthropology where the pick of all the indigenous artifacts and things are stored. I think they were also pretty blown away by Teotihuacan (the pyramids). Although we thought we'd be smart and go to see them on Good Friday, thinking everyone else in Mexico would be off celebrating at home but oh no, the place was astonishingly packed. The queue to climb the Sun pyramid was at least 2 hours long, and what with it being a hot day and absolutely no shade we all three decided against that one. We did climb the moon pyramid, which I think has the better view anyway so it wasn't a bad day at all. And with all the people climbing on the pyramids you got a better idea of the scale of everything.
Easter Saturday we packed up early early early and headed to the airport with little trouble (there is no traffic at 6am). With no real problems we made it to Orlando, Florida and boarded the Disney Express to our hotel in Disney World. I thought Orlando Disney world would be a bit of a
cop out after Disneyland on the other side but Oh MY GOD is it huge. Disney World itself was the size of a small town with other 15 resorts (the resort we were in had two 'brother' resorts, so they were all the same design and they could fit well over 10,000 people easily into just those three resorts). Little did we know until we got there was that Spring Break was still happening for a lot of people and we'd unwittingly picked on the busiest weeks to visit so you can imagine there were kids and parents and bags and prams and more kids EVERYWHERE. We had settled into the hotel (the quiet side thank god) by 4ish and mum and I decided to not waste anytime and head to the oldest of the six parks (yes, they have about six parks in the whole complex. Complete parks, not iddy biddy little things).
The Magical Kingdom was gorgeous, Sleeping Beautys' palace, the cups and saucers ride for mum, Peter Pan, Merry-go-round, the Dumbo ride, Pooh's grand adventure and my favourite the 3d show of Donald Duck and Mickey with the Philharmonic Orchestra in the background. It was so
awesome! Then there was Epcot, another park with the giant golf ball in the middle of it. We all enjoyed the rides here like one where you went back to the Dinosaur ages and the entire theatre turned into a moving ride, the space mission which spun you around and simulated a mission to mars, launch and everything, Soarin' where it felt like you were hang gliding around the world and my personal favourite the Finding nemo exhibit and ride where they'd installed and absolutely enormous tank and had all kinds of exotic and beautiful fish, turtles, sharks, stingrays, manatees and dolphins. That night at Epcot we stumbled across a concert for Hermans' Hermits (don't ask me, they're from the 60s or something), and I've never laughed so hard. I should take mum and dad to concerts more often. Hilarious.
We had a visit also from my cousin Alison for a day and we all went to the Movie world equivalent where they had amazing stunt shows with cars and Indiana Jones, the Muppet show of course, a must see, and a pretty cool roller coaster that was powered my magnets or something so there was so up hill
before you shot down hill, they literally fired you down the track like they fire a gun.
We did have a day off to go see the Kennedy Space Centre which was really cool, in a nerdy star wars kind of way. You saw a lot of what they had done, the applications of new technology, you could go on a simulated space launch, and walk into one of the shuttles that they had actually used on missions. They also had set up life size replicas of every missile, shuttle, lander they'd every built and you could take buses on a tour around the rest of the site included the building where they assemble everything, the launch pad (it had a shuttle already sitting there for take off on may 2nd!!), the Apollos' museum and the Space Station centre. All in all mum and dad were VERY impressed with the whole thing, they spent the whole day going "god, I remember this on t.v" and "oh yeah, that happened too, I was such and such an age". You could even touch a rock from the moon and see the Apollo 11 landing again on the big screen. Picture all
of that with that patriotic, hollywood movie blockbuster heroic music playing in the background all day long too and it's like you'll have been there too!
On our last full day we visited the last full park the Animal Kingdom which had a safari (real animals) and water rapids (mum and I got soaked and the rest of the tire had two drops or something), and the 3d bugs life show where the seat poked you and rippled and all this cool new technology.
So it ended up taking us 5 full days to do 4 theme parks properly. The only thing we missed out on was this holden race track/roller coaster thing, so not too bad at all for peak week spring break traffic. I've also developed a true hatred for pram wielding, bullying, loud mouthed parents and the more annoying, bratty examples of children out there in the world.
I'm sure you'll hear more from Mum and Dad about our adventures. In the meantime I have 7 weeks or so left here in Guadalajara and then off the Ecuador and Peru for a month and soon I'll be back in Aus! My love to you
all. xx
Advertisement
Tot: 0.087s; Tpl: 0.013s; cc: 9; qc: 49; dbt: 0.0621s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb