Shanghai Disneyland day two!
But first, I woke up super early, around 6am, I think. The park didn’t open until 8am today, but I actually decided that I didn’t need to run into the park first thing. I feel like I mostly did and saw what I wanted yesterday. In hindsight, I probably would have been fine with a single park day. But I wouldn’t have necessarily known that for sure with only one day in the park, so I feel better about having more time than I needed. In any case, I enjoyed the things I did today, so it was fine.
Since I was up so early, I used the time well. First of all, I was finally able to decide what I’m doing after Shanghai. It is a significant departure from the original plan! I’m going to keep being mysterious about it, but I will say that I lengthened my next stop by quite a bit and I completely changed the plan for after that. That change might be a bit of a let down for you, but I really thought about what I wanted to do with my time off and I’m sticking to my guns on this one. I’m happy with the new plan. Anyway, I booked an Airbnb for the first couple of days of my next stop. I’m going to take a few days to chill for a bit before I jump into tourist mode again. It was good to get this next bit planned because I get on a plane tomorrow.
Also, this morning, I did laundry. Why? Because the hotel provided laundry soap! It was in the bathroom with the other soaps etc. So, I washed all of my dirty stuff and hung it around the room to dry.
I left the hotel at 11:30am. Today was just about taking it easy and enjoying the park at a leisurely pace. I did go through the main entrance this time, so I saw all of the barriers set up for the lines. There were so many. I’m glad that I got a special entry yesterday and chose a late entry for today.
As I wandered into the park, I realized that the parade was starting in just a few minutes. So I grabbed a spot to watch (on the castle side of the route which was significantly less crowded) and hoped that I would be in a good spot for the music. It turned out not to be quite the perfect place music-wise, but I had a front row spot, so I did have a better view.
As the parade was officially starting (which happened way across the park, so it was 15 minutes before it made it to us), I opened the app to see the fastpass situation. There were passes left for Buzz Lightyear, so I got one of those.
After the parade finished, I just wandered through the restaurants and shops on Mickey Avenue (their Main Street USA area). I just took in all of the theming elements like I mentioned that I would do yesterday. It’s seriously so much fun! There is so much more Disney in the details than there is in the US. Here are a couple of murals from the walls of one of the restaurants. It's a mix of so many movies!
Look! A Lady and the Tramp restaurant scene recreation. It's outside of a restaurant called Tony's, which is the one from the movie.
I made it into a confectionary shop, so I bought some sweet treats. This was accomplished by pointing at a picture menu of all of the items. I made sure not to order three of everything again. Somebody tried to cut in front of me when I was next, but the counter people took care of me and let me go first. I appreciated it. I ate my sweets on a bench out on the street.
I saw that odd band from yesterday again. Sure enough. Happy from Despicable Me. Seriously. What?
My sweets vanquished, I wandered through the rest of the street enjoying all of the details. Here are several mosaics on the theater-like marquis of one of the buildings. I LOVE that Pluto and the crab are on it.
When is the last time you saw a Great Mouse Detective reference in a Disney park? That's Basil of Baker Street's outfit in the window of a pretend tailor in upper right. I noticed that manhole cover in the upper left while I was eating my snacks. I thought that the secret magicians club was fun. Notice that mason-esque secret symbol they added.
It turns out that they have a Club 33 as well. They had addresses on a couple of surrounding buildings, which somewhat disguised the existence of the very exclusive Disney club.
One of the shop fronts was a post office that had P.O. boxes with the names/signatures of a bunch of characters. I appreciate that Ludwig Von Drake is on there. He's not a common character, but I did see him in a couple of places in this park. I'm just including this one shot, but this was just a quarter of them.
Okay. So, on the bottom of this next one there is the car from Roger Rabbit (also notice the Big Bad Wolf in the background). But the one on the top takes the cake. I couldn't believe it when I saw that. It was just up as an ad on the side of a building. It's Little Toot and his father from Melody Time! I don't think I've ever seen a reference to that outside of the actual cartoon itself.
Then it was time for today’s bonus fastpass that I got for staying on resort. This ride is their version of Grizzly River Rapids in California Adventure. As I got closer to the front of the line I realized that EVERYONE had pulled out a poncho and put it on.
I felt very conspicuous. There was a lady a few people ahead who didn’t have one, but she hailed one of the people getting off of the ride (like those two guys in the line green shirts on the left) and got theirs to put on. Looking even more closely, I did see one or two people also braving the ride without water protection, so I determined that I hadn’t missed a crucial sign and/or wasn’t breaking a rule by being uncovered. The ride was fun. I think it was significantly higher than California’s. We went up for a long time before it dropped us into the river part of the ride. I got a bit wet, but nothing too dramatic.
After that, it was Buzz Lightyear time again! When I got to the ride, they weren’t even actually accepting fastpasses because there was no wait in the standby line. So I just did standby. I was just as amazing this time and, actually, I found a secret target to hit that gave me a whole bunch of points. There are two LGMs holding a mirror that shows a target on the back side of the evil Emperor Zurg. Since I still had a fastpass, I decided to go right back onto the ride. There was a short wait by then, but I still got to avoid it. I was amazing again. That secret target was very helpful (both times after the ride, I didn't see anyone else with a score higher than 800K).
I went to another of the shows after that. It was the Frozen Sing-along Spectacular. I sat fourth row in house left. I couldn’t understand anything that was said, but the kids were really cute singing along and everything. I did decide that Kristoff (who was white) speaks Mandarin with a terrible accent. You know, because I can speak with great authority on the subject.
Then I walked to the opposite end of the park to see the Jack Sparrow Stunt Show. This one really was almost not worth it, because of the amount of speaking in Chinese that there was. The jokes, the storyline, almost all of it was lost on me. There were a couple of moments though that salvaged the experience, like when they flooded the audience with mist and when they had an indoor skydiving type of giant fan set into the stage and a couple of people did a bunch of mid-air acrobatics.
As I left that, I saw that the wait for Pirates was only 10 minutes, so I jumped in that line for the third time. This was the time that I actually took some pictures (that I posted yesterday) and video.
Then I wandered through the park catching various things that were interesting that I hadn’t yet done. There was a maze with an Alice in Wonderland theme. It was themed after the new Tim Burton version. It was basically impossible to get any pictures in the maze because of people throwing their children in front of anything remotely picture-worthy. It was this experience that really cemented my concerns for the children of the world. I don’t know what I’m worried about, but I’ll feel very vindicated in 20 years when it turns out that there’s fallout from this behavior.
I went into the castle and saw some AMAZING mosaics. Here's a collage to show some of the detail.
And here's another showing the other scenes. They were beautiful.
Unfortunately, there was some sort of castle walkthrough that had closed for the day. That’s one thing I regret missing.
I finally got to go on a ride called Voyage to the Crystal Grotto. I’d been watching the wait time in the app for the past two days and finally decided that it was reasonable enough to justify the wait. Also, it was nearing the end of my last day in the parks. It was a boat ride that had water features for various Disney movies. There was some really cool detailing on the characters. You can see what I mean on Genie. Instead of sticking to the solid colors of the characters, they added designs to them. Most of the characters had these additions.
After that, I tried to go get in place for the firework show. I was determined to get a better seat this time. However, they had already blocked off all of the paths that were close to the castle. I had to take a significant detour to get back around to the front of the castle.
I found a place to sit at the front of a section about 55 minutes early. There were lots of cast members yelling in Chinese. No idea what that was about. None of them yelled directly at me, though, so I wasn’t too worried. I did see them yell at a few people in the section ahead of me when they stood up and I was able to determine that I was not just in a section where people were sitting to wait for the fireworks, but a section where you needed to remain seated throughout the show.
The most surprising thing about what followed was how many people bailed before the show was over. The first wave abandoned their seats when the announcement came on again that said that there wouldn’t be actual fireworks tonight due to air quality. Then, a bit later, it started to rain. More people bailed. Then, throughout the show, people would just randomly get up and leave. I don’t understand why they would wait an hour or more for the show and then give up a few minutes in.
The fireworks happen at park close. So, I made my way back out to the shops with the crowd and started agonizing over whether I would buy any souvenirs. Specifically, there was a fun Spider-man baseball cap and a Captain American version that were very attractive.
The draw was the size. I have a really big head, but I’ve found that a lot of Asians do as well. So, the hats are significantly larger than you find in American shops. I went back and forth and finally decided not to buy it. It would require a really big Spider-man commitment anytime I wanted to wear it. I ended up not buying anything actually. It’s kind of nice to not be going home with more junk that I don’t need.
Then, to wrap up the whole experience, I went back to that place that I failed at my first night in Shanghai and bought some food! Very satisfying.
Back at the hotel, I ate my success food and decided to pack in the morning.