These Shanghai Disneyland posts are going to be a challenge. They are very full days with so many new sights and details and comparisons. I will try not to go too long and might break off some stuff for the end of the post again to make it easier for you to decide how much you want to consume.
The park opened at 8am and I made it through the gates at 8:10am. Resort hotel guests get to use a special entrance to avoid what are apparently pretty decent-sized crowds at the main entrance. This is how our line looked at least.
The castle was immediately visible once I got into the park. I was really happy to be back in a Disney park. I really do love them. I have to say, though, that it was a bit muted by the smog. The castle is beautiful, but it’s surrounded by a haze that is a bit detracting. I meandered for a bit just taking in the castle and the area in front of it.
There were people running everywhere. I haven’t seen this is in other Disney parks (I forget whether I’ve mentioned them all to you. I’ve been to Disneyland and Disney’s California Adventure, all four Disney World parks, and Disneyland Paris). A little worried that the rides will really fill up fast, I decided to head for one. Apparently, Peter Pan’s Flight is just as popular here as it is in the states, so I went there. It was fun. It was longer than the original with a bit more technology involved as well. Not a lot though. It was still true to the original experience. The...I don’t know…ride carriage(?) held four people instead of only two, though, which did make it a touch less magical, but it wasn’t too terribly detrimental. Not a huge detail, but I took a photo, so here you go.
The big ride at Shanghai Disneyland is the Tron roller coaster. I looked at the park’s app and it said that the wait time was only 20 minutes. I have a fastpass for it later today. Something I read recommended doing it after dark, so I chose a later time slot for this ride when I was at concierge yesterday. Nothing says that I can’t ride it multiple times though. When I got there, though, the wait time was actually 40 minutes even though the app still said 20. It was probably all of those running people throwing things off, right?
I’ll mention here that their Tomorrowland, where the Tron coaster is, is amazing! It is definitely the highlight of the park for me. It’s so much more impressive than the version in Disneyland, which has always been a bit of a disappointment to me (which is probably due largely to the fact that their futuristic pizza place is NOT Pizza Planet). Just look at their Tomorrowland sign!
I got on the Buzz Lightyear Astro-blaster ride instead. This is a more elaborate version than Disneyland’s. It’s way better. I doubt that you know this, but that ride is probably my favorite in Disneyland. So this new and improved version was really exciting. One thing that was really cool was that you could always see where your gun was pointing with a laser pointer sort of dot. In Disneyland, you can only see that dot when your gun fires, which means it just flashes for a split second. It’s kind of hard to track. I am happy to report that I made it into the highest point bracket. I reached the rank of Galactic Hero!
After I came out of that ride, it started raining. People were still running around a lot even though it was definitely after the initial park opening rush. I also feel like I was getting bumped into a lot. Like, more than I would expect given that the park wasn’t especially crowded. It was pretty humid out and I was also damp from the rain (because I obviously didn’t bother with a rain poncho or buying an umbrella. Come on. It’s just rain). I also had felt a little sick all morning. I think it may have just been when I was outside. Some combination of lack of sleep and rain and humidity and smog. I was trying to decide whether that was the case or whether I was just imagining that part at the time, but didn’t come to any firm conclusions.
From there, I decided to check out their Pirates ride. Before I go into talking about the ride, here are a couple of fun pictures from waiting in line. They are horse shoes labeled with a bunch of animal Disney character names. So fun! Do you recognize them all?
Okay, the ride. This ride was AMAZING!!! If you’re already considering a visit to this park, I would say that this ride alone makes it worth a visit. This is meant to be a different ride from the original and not just a clone. If you would prefer not to have the ride spoiled, skip this section and the next pictures. The ride is all in Chinese, so I’m kind of guessing here, but it seems that it takes place sometime long after the original. Lots of people were taking photos and video during the ride, so I decided when in Rome… (these are actually from when I rode the ride for the third time after I had already had the full experience twice, but I’ll include them here).
Here you see an iconic scene from the original ride, but everyone, including the dog, is a skeleton now.
Later, the skeleton at the wheel of a ship from the original turns into Jack Sparrow, who (speaking Chinese) seems to be surprised to be alive again. That was an impressive piece of technology. The skeleton just shimmered and turned into an animatronic Jack Sparrow. After that, your boat flips around to continue through the ride backward and, this is the major spoiler, you’re brought in front of a couple of these giant wraparound video screens, similar to the Soarin’ ride. The effect is SO impressive! My mouth was just hanging open through that whole section. So SO impressive!
After that, I continued to work my way through Adventureland. I saw a Jack Sparrow. In fact, I saw many characters here. A lot more than I’ve seen at other parks. And the lines to meet them were actually all reasonable. What I was interested to see ahead of time is whether they would all be played by Chinese cast members. I found that, in general, in the shows they were often Chinese, but the character meet and greets matched the original race of the character.
I’m sorry! This is going to be SO long. Please just skip ahead or just look at the pictures if you’d prefer. I’m going to just let these two days be as long as they are going to be and you can bail out whenever you’d like.
The next “ride” that I went on is unique among any attraction I’ve seen at a park. It was a sort of ropes course where they fit you with a harness and tether you to a track overhead and you can walk through various obstacles.
You had to put all of your stuff into a locker ahead of time. I was still stopped before I got into line, because the cast member attending that line could see that I had a cell phone in my pocket and it didn’t matter that it was velcro’d closed. I may have just walked away, tucked the phone into my pants, and then came back and got in line. Don’t tell. Look! A photo of me going through the attraction!
It was time for some food after I finally made it all through Adventureland. I tried a thing that I saw in Disneytown last night called flosss (three s’s are intentional). I think that last night it was a brand name and today, in the park, it was referring to the fact that it is covered in what I gather is referred to as “pork floss.” You can see it covering the bun. I also got a pineapple bun. The pineapple bun didn’t seem to have anything pineapple-y about it and the floss bun ended up being filled with what seemed to be spiced mayonnaise. Neither was bad (the filling was a bit much) but I didn’t finish either. Not finishing them, though, was more a strategy for being able to try many things while I’m here and NOT spending the whole day feeling uncomfortably stuffed. Here is what those looked like along with a couple of treats from later in the day.
While I was sitting and eating, I caught a band that came out and started playing. It was a little weird. They played Topsy Turvy from the Hunchback of Notre Dame, one of my favorite Disney movies, which was fun. But they also played a bit of Beethoven and then ended with “Happy,” the Pharrell song from Despicable Me. I’m sorry. What?
Their once-a-day parade was about to start, so I stopped and grabbed a chocolate and vanilla soft serve ice cream cone (the lady at the counter seemed really put out that I didn’t want the lavender soft serve) and found a spot to watch the parade.
It was a bit of a disappointing spot, because I was kind of between when the interesting choreography would happen for the various groups that walked past. They were like in just a long walking part of their repeating sequence when they were actually in front of me. But it was still fun to watch anyway.
Maybe I’ll mention now that the theming in the park is so...thorough? amazing? creative? varied? They incorporate A LOT of small details from various Disney things and not just the obvious big things that are really popular that everyone knows about. Tomorrow, I’ll spend some time just taking pictures of some of what I mean.
This is the point in the day where I snapped this pic, so I’ll include it now. This is what was in most of the toilet stalls in the bathrooms, though there was also always a couple of sitting toilets in stalls at the far end.
On my way to my next ride, the dwarf mine cart ride, for which I had a fastpass, which I got the normal way through the app when I entered the park. Actually, that is one thing. You can’t choose fast passes for the day until your ticket is scanned in at the park gate. Disney World does digital fastpasses through their app as well and I think that you can schedule those up to like 30 days in advance or something. Anyway, on my way to the ride, I grabbed some caramel corn from a cart I passed. I was able to use my credit card at the other places in the park, but the carts need one of those stupid apps or cash. I do have cash, so I opted for that. The caramel corn was yummy. Again, I didn’t finish all of it though.
It was 1:30pm when I scanned in for my fastpass at the mine carts. Since that made me eligible for another pass, I looked in the app to see what was available. Nothing was. That actually was basically already the case when I had glanced at the app around 11am. The ride was the same as the version in...Magic Kingdom in Disney World, I think is where that is? I could confirm all of these facts, but these Disney posts are already Herculean.
So, I mentioned that my favorite ride is Astro-blasters, but hands-down my favorite thing to do in Disney parks are the animation activities, where you learn to draw a Disney character. Shanghai Disneyland has an indoor Marvel area with a couple of things to do, like meet Captain America and Spider-man. I opted not to meet any of the characters while I was in the park though. Anyway, one of the things that they have to do is a learn to draw a Marvel character session! Apparently, they just have one a day. The time is not posted and the area is not set up to advertise it at all. I had to ask a cast member and then come back when it was happening. There were five of us when it started and two more joined a few minutes later. The room was set up to hold a good 50-75 people. The teacher spoke in Chinese, but it was easy enough to follow along with the drawing. The best part! We drew Spider-man. My favorite! I’m happy with how mine turned out too! Notice the little spider that she had us add at the end.
So, by this point, I had definitely hit the my-sunblock-from-this-morning-is-long-gone-and-the-sun-is-actively-killing-me stage. However, I hadn’t brought my sunblock into the park, because I didn’t want to carry it all day. My plan was to go back to the hotel if I needed it. I did, so I did. I was able to spend a few minutes there researching my next stop, which is sorely needed. I run out of plans in two days.
There are a number of shows in the park that I wanted to see and my fast pass would be up in a few hours, so I headed back to the park. On the way to the first show, I found that the Pirates line was only at 15 minutes! So, I jumped in line and rode that for a second time. It was less amazing this time, which makes sense, but I still really enjoyed it.
The show that I was headed for was Tarzan. It turned out to be a Tarzan-themed Chinese acrobat performance! Tarzan and Jane were both super talented aerialists. I mean, I’m not really an expert, but they did some partner stuff high off of the ground that I’ve never seen before. I was able to get a seat in the fifth row, so I had a great view. This was the show in which I was least interested, but I LOVED it. So good!
It was time for my Tron pass. When I got to Tomorrowland, I saw that another of the shows was actually just a DJ playing techno music. I’m sure it was great, but I was glad that I hadn’t sacrificed Tarzan for it. The standby line for Tron actually wasn’t that long, so I decided to just wait for it. There were lockers for this ride, too. I had another payment failure. I couldn’t get my card to work to pay for a locker. So, I eventually gave up, but then I realized that people were taking bags into the ride and these lockers were just normal day-use lockers and not ride-specific.
This was a pretty cool ride. Visually, the area where they put people onto the coaster was stunning.
The unique thing about this ride is the position that you’re in during the ride. You’re leaning forward, belly down, on a Tron-cycle. It is ingenious the way that you get onto it and it locks you in. Completely comfortable. Feels very safe. Super easy to mount and dismount. I immediately rode it a second time using my fastpass and enjoyed it even more. Oh, they had people just drop their bags into a bin on wheels before they got on the ride and then it is waiting once they get off at the end. It worked out pretty well.
I was really hungry at this point, so I decided to go to the main restaurant in Tomorrowland. It turned out to be a burger place, which was fine with me. However. However. Oh man. So, I order combo #3, which was just a burger, fries, and a soda. At all of the restaurants, they have visual menus at the cash register so non-Chinese speakers can just point. Well, I pointed and said that I wanted number 3. He said okay. I paid. He didn’t ask what drink I wanted. I looked at my receipt and it suspiciously looked like I was going to get THREE of everything. I asked the worker at the counter where you pick up your food if that was the case. She didn’t understand me, so she called over their English-speaking worker. We had several minutes of back and forth where I tried to confirm that I only wanted one burger, one fry, and one soda. She did not understand me at all and I finally just decided to take whatever they gave. Sure enough. This is what I got.
So, my $13 meal cost me $40. I had three burgers, three fries, and three Pepsis, which I don’t drink. I ate a burger and most of one of the fries and tossed the rest. Oh well.
Let me acknowledge something here about the language gap. I don’t at all hold it against any of the cast members if they don’t understand me when I’m speaking English. I’m in China. Anytime I interact with someone who is speaking English is an accommodation for me that they don’t HAVE to make and I sincerely appreciate it. I’m the one who doesn’t speak the language of the country that I’m in. I just appreciate that the park is as accessible to English-speakers as it is.
After dinner, I went and found a spot for fireworks. It was 7:35 and fireworks were at 8pm. This area of the park is huge, but it was already really full. They had apparently closed off smaller areas of it as they filled up and I had to find a place pretty far back. They announced ahead of time that they would not be having fireworks during the show due to air quality regulations in Shanghai. That’s interesting, because they did have fireworks the night before, so it seems like it’s not just an every night message that they play. The show was similar to a lot of shows that I’ve seen at Disney parks now. They did make better use of projections on the castle, which I’m sure is easier when the castle is as large as it is. It’s the largest of all of the Disneyland castles btw. The projections were edited really well and felt a lot less awkward than the other castle shows I’ve seen, where the Disney clips often didn’t mesh well together. The same goes for the music. The edits and transitions were really smooth.
That was the end of my first Shanghai Disneyland day! I eventually got back to the hotel, of course.
Sorry I didn’t break anything off. It turned out to be easier to just put it all together. If you’ve read this far, cheers! Thanks for taking the time to catch up with my travels. If you want an extra challenge, tackle tomorrow’s post. I bet it’s going to be a doozy as well.