Wednesday, April 11, 2012

Hong Kong trip 2012 - Day 1

Here's Ryan on the plane - happy and excited!


The plane took off at 7.30 am, when the skies were just breaking to the morning sun. I took way too many photos of the stunning clouds - here are just two.



We were picked up at the airport and bus-ed to our hotel in Disneyland. Our room wasn't ready yet, so we took the shuttle into the theme park.



This is the large fountain just outside the ticketing booths. There's Mickey Mouse on his surfboard, which goes up and down! There are various other characters peppered around the fountain.


This is just after the entrance gates. The building behind is the train station - the train runs along the perimeter of the theme park, making one stop at Fantasyland, which is halfway along the route.


Into the park we go! You feel the happiness instantly! There's Sleeping Beauty's Castle in the background!


We decided to save the "lands" for the next day, opting to stay in "Main Street, USA" for today. It was styled like a small town in Middle America in the early 1900s. It is the gateway to the "lands", ie. you pass through here before reaching any of the "lands".


Street performers appear every so often. We saw this percussion duo (dressed like the street cleaners) and, the next day, a marching band.


Lunch at the Corner Cafe.


Queued up for a photo with Mickey and Minnie! Actually Richard joined the queue while Ryan and I played with a barrel of monkeys that we just bought from one of the shops.



Ryan was pretty excited to see Mickey. We got some "official" photos taken by the park's photographer, including one with our whole family. This one was taken by Richard on our camera.


We stayed for the parade at 4.00 pm (captured it on the handycam) - really lively and fun, saw all the characters at one go! Milled around for a bit more before we decided to head on back to the hotel.

Our hotel room was pretty nice!


A complimentary mini birthday cake for me from Mickey Mouse!


We bought a Woody toy for Ryan from the theme park. It even has a pull string at the back, just like the one in the movie! Woody has a few phrases that he says when you pull the string. 




Ryan fell asleep just before 7 pm. Richard and I were pretty zonked too ...


... but we made an effort to get up for the fireworks at 8.00 pm, which we watched from our hotel room window and recorded on the handycam. We'd paid for a room upgrade to a higher floor just for the fireworks, so it seemed silly to ignore the show. After the show (which lasted about 10 minutes), the two of us had a quiet dinner in the room while Ryan continued sleeping. There was no room service so Richard had to go downstairs to one of the hotel's food outlets to buy our dinner. While he was at the lobby, he had the fortune to bump into Donald Duck!


Richard was pleased as punch because I'd told him that Donald Duck was the most elusive one to catch, and he'd managed to get up close and personal with the dude without any effort! When he got back to our room, he showed me the photo and gloated:

"Hotel room? $xxx
Dinner? $30
Meeting Donald Duck? Priceless."

And that was our first day in Disneyland.

2 comments:

Karmeleon said...

Can't tell that he's in his PJs, lah. Why was he wearing PJs on the plane journey anyway? And you could've taken out clothes from suitcase for him to change before putting the luggage into the "care-of" area at the hotel.

It's totally common to take an early flight to HK and be ready to leave luggage with hotel and head straight to Disneyland to maximise the 2-day ticket. ;D

Pinkie Pirate said...

Hi Karmeleon, Ryan was in his pajamas because, having gone to bed so late, we hoped that he would stay asleep on the plane - no such luck! Yes, we could have but we chose not to open our luggage and rummage through without getting our room. Plus, like you mentioned, his PJs were actually quite presentable. We also weren't concerned about maximising the tickets because we were too tired and knew Ryan would not last much longer on the first day! Thanks for stopping by!

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