Day 2 [part 2]: First night of sort of Disney Magic… Disneytown!
So finally we popped onto the bus to take us over to Disneytown! It was a very short ride, about 5 minutes. Sorry I don’t have a photo of what it looks like from the bus station.
Here you can see the Shanghai
Disneyland Hotel across the water
Yay the Disneytown sign!
(This whole time since coming back I’ve been calling it Disney Town. Like, two distinct words. It took me until I just uploaded this photo to see that it’s one word: Disneytown. I was like what the… and looked it up. It’s Disneytown one word ahahaha.)
Here is the sign of it from further back
Based on where I was standing in relation to the Disneytown sign when I took this photo… To the left is World of Disney. To the right is the Mickey fountain that leads to security and ticketing and park. Through the arch and behind is shops and eating!
We did LOTS of wandering. We didn’t have any plans as to what we might want to eat, so we decided to just walk around, look at some stores, and if a place tickled our fancy for food we’d go and eat there! Since we were just wandering, we had no idea the layout of Disneytown and just went with it.
First photo op: GIANT DUFFY AND SHELLIE MAY ON A BENCH
I knew that Duffy and Shellie May were super super popular in Japan, but I didn’t know that it carried over into Shanghai as well. I’ve found that in North America, you either love Duffy the Disney bear, or you really didn’t like him haha. In our group, Glendon and I LOVE Duffy, and Jenna and Brian don’t haha. I think this definitely has to do with the fact that Glendon has been to Tokyo before when he was younger and got to be fully immersed in the Duffy craze, to which he got super excited to explain to me on our first Disneyland trip together. I always thought Duffy was the cutest teddy bear, so add that with Glendon’s enthusiasm, it was easy for me to also fall in love with Duffy. I guess it also helps that Glendon bought me my Duffy during that said Disneyland trip when I got very sick haha. And I think for Jenna and Brian, they see it as Duffy was kind of forced upon the market, being labelled as the Disney bear. Anyways… I LOVE the expansion of the Duffy universe haha. I mean… Just look at Shellie May!! She’s a PINK version of Duffy with eyelashes and a big BOW! Plus with the Mickey paws… I just love them.
MOVING ON!
Look at this cute entrance to World of Disney
It’s like Mickey and Minnie world travellers, shopping and holding hands. I love it! Can I have this made and put it on display on a wall at home??
Our first tsum tsum sighting
I know that this wasn’t in World of Disney (we decided to do World of Disney on our way out after dinner) but we had popped into a smaller store and spotted the tsum sums. I think the store was… i.T? Anyways I hadn’t had a chance to go into a
Disney store back home in a while so I wanted to see what they had in terms of variety. Lots of Finding Dory still!
Another night time view of some of Disneytown
We wandered around trying to figure out what to eat. Mostly we wanted to try some Chinese food, but at the same time we didn’t want to spend too much money right off the bat on our first night. (We skipped options like Cheesecake Factory, Japanese chains, and the bigger fancier Chinese restaurants like Shanghai Min.) Our first stop we decided to check out was called Food Republic, since it looked like a food court type, quick service area. Lots of different options inside that you can choose from, and it was packed with Chinese people. So we thought yeah, why not try here! Except… We couldn’t really figure out how to order and pay. We got directed to some machines… so we THINK you load up a pre-paid card and use that to buy your quick service meal. Anyways we were too tired to try and figure it out, so we decided to try an actual small restaurant. We ended up choosing a place called The Dining Room.
I forgot to take a photo of the menu! But basically we ordered based on the pictures we saw haha.
Jenna and Brian got this rice dish
We had to order Soup Dumplings!
(XLB! XLB! XLB! Xiao long bao, soup dumplings, originated in the Shanghai region so we had to have some our first night!)
We ordered this thinking it was like the siu mai pork dumplings we get at dimsum
But it’s more like a…. rice dumpling with little bits of pork! Different, but not bad
This is another dish that is popular in Northern China
It’s a spicy bean curd/tofu thing dish?? Umm I’m not really sure how to describe it. But it’s SO spicy. Spicy in a way where there’s no taste… just ridiculous HEAT!
AND sitting in this restaurant is where I had my first experience of whipping out my awful mandarin! And it went exactly as we anticipated: not the greatest
I tried to order Glendon and I some plain white rice to eat with our bean curd thing. I’m not sure if it’s just not common to have plain white rice with your dish, or the guy literally could not understand at ALL what I wanted, but basically he just said “no we don’t have that” hahaha. THEN I tried to ask for 4 glasses of ice water. But I couldn’t, for the life of me, remember how to say the word for GLASS. So I was sitting there errrrr-ing and just basically asked for 4 waters, without saying glass/cup. To which, of course, the server clarified back, “4 GLASSES of water??” “YES!!! Thank you!!” The server returned with 4 glasses of hot, boiled water. Which at first everyone was laughing at me that I really failed at this. But then we actually didn’t mind, because we were seated right by the doors, and it was FREEZING (to the point where the hostesses were wearing floor length parkas). BUT THEN we realized we forgot you can’t drink the tap water… and they only drink boiled water or bottled water. And since we asked for free water, we got the boiled water haha.
Here is a view into the restaurant from where we were seated
Notice, everyone is wrapped up in their winter coats.
So after food, we went and wandered to look at some of the stores! First stop, the
Lego store!! We LOVE seeing the Lego displays around the store! I always think they’re so impressive. I’m still impressed by the ones at Disney Springs and I always go and stare at them, even though I’ve looked at them so many times now.
Here is a Thor, Iron Man, and Captain America hanging from the ceiling with a gorgeous skyline in the back
View from the second floor down
You can see Mulan there!!!
A HUGE dragon wrapped around the elevator shaft
A close up of these guys hehe
Soooooo cool
I forgot to take a photo of the actual store… and I missed a lot of the other displays. But I think you can tell which ones I liked the most haha.
Disneytown has a BAPE store! (Japanese clothing brand)
Glendon used to LOVE A Bathing Ape (again, after his first trip to Tokyo haha) but there is only ONE official store in North America… in New York. He REALLY wanted to go to the one in New York when we were there three years ago, but it was much too far out of the way from where we were staying and we ran out of time. SO seeing this store in Shanghai was a HUGE deal for Glendon! (There are only 17 total stores outside of Japan across the world!) We didn’t buy anything, we weren’t looking to spend too much money. I just liked looking at the cute characters of the brand. And Glendon was just happy to finally have his store experience.
We wandered a few stores… Jenna and I popped into the Sephora just because we were curious just how badly inflated the prices were compared to back home. China adds a HUGE tax on luxury goods including cosmetics. I see Chinese girls come into cosmetics stores in Canada every day to buy cosmetics nearly in bulk to bring back to China, so I was definitely wondering just how much more things cost. We did rough calculations… a lip product that I own too-many of… that costs $45 CAD back home… we did the conversions from Yuan to CAD and I think it came to about $65-$70 CAD. Yikes! I thought paying the $45 was waaaaaay too much. I can’t imagine that product costing almost $70 to buy. After Sephora we also popped into the Innisfree shop! This is a Korean brand of skincare and cosmetics, and is quite famous for their sheet masks. For some reason we decided not to buy anything… I think we were thinking we would just get some in Japan since we had more time for shopping then. Little did we know, this would be the only time our entire trip that we saw an Innisfree shop haha. That’s okay, we can
Amazon the sheet masks if we REALLY wanted them for a decent price back home. SO it wasn’t too big a deal that we didn’t get anything. (We were mostly obsessed with finding Japanese skincare anyways, as Korean skincare is more easily assessable in Canada now)
Then finally, we went to look around World of Disney!
Here is a video of our first view:
Originally… I had recorded myself saying “We are HERE! WORLD OF DISNEY!!! It’s HUGE in here!!” because I had totally thought it was like in Florida, where you walk into a door and you are in one room… and then you move onto the next room. So I thought this first room was so big. Then I realized it was the entire shop LOL. Oops! SO World of Disney inn Disneytown is all in this big circular store. Not as huge as I was expecting, for a World of Disney.
Here are some photos of some of the merchandise I liked/thought were interesting!
More tsum sum merchandise
A BIG wooden Duffy displayer! (back side)
Front side! (Placed right inside one of the entrances)
Why is it so cute =O
Duffy and Shellie May stuff!
Tron Lightcycle Power Run merch!
This might have been my favourite weird item I saw!
You colour the pieces and then insert the pieces together to build the scene!
(I have no idea what I would do with this, though, so it did not get to come home with us)
(ALSO a real life update: we went into our local Disney store the other day and saw something very similar to this in the store!)
After walking through Disneytown (we didn’t buy anything yet because we weren’t sure what we would like most about the park to bring home with us!) we decided to pop back to our hotel. But first, we stopped into the Starbucks to see if by chance they carried the You-Are-Here mugs for the park. We were pretty sure they didn’t, but it didn’t hurt to look, right? (They don’t have them for the park haha)
A small view inside:
Pretty cute
But our favourite part of this Starbucks is the lights they have outside:
They’re little Starbucks coffee mugs!!!!
Then when we got back to the hotel, we decided to walk around a little bit. Glendon wanted to take a quick peek at the cafe in the hotel (Sunnyside Cafe)
It’s so cute! Hanging from the ceiling are kites with each of the characters on them in cartoon style
We also popped into the grab-and-go foods area just to take a look and everything is cute!
I really wanted to grab a Mickey pork bun to go (I forgot to take a photo, but they have a heated glass displayer with hot, Mickey and Minnie shaped buns! Mickey is pork and I think Minnie is Red Bean) but Glendon said don’t eat a big bun before bed haha. SO no cute Mickey shaped bun for meeeeee.
Look at the washroom signs! Hehehehe
(I have yet to meet someone who could actually do awesome drawings on an Etch-A-Sketch! I know there ARE amazing Etch-A-Sketch artists out there… I just haven’t seen any in person yet!)
Here is the cute spaceship carpet on our way back to our room
And here we are at our room number!
You can turn the red light on and off from inside your room. I think it’s the do-not-disturb notice haha. And now it is time for bed, as we had a big day ahead of us… The most exciting of all, OUR FIRST DAY AT A BRAND NEW PARK THAT NONE OF US HAVE BEEN TO YET!!!! Park hours for the Friday are 9am open to 8pm close.
[One of our favourite things of the hotel is that the aliens/Jessie announce your floor in the elevators. I have a video of the aliens' voices because it's super cute, but I will post it in the next one. We recorded on our way to breakfast!]
Up Next…
OUR FIRST DAY AT SHANGHAI DISNEYLAND!
I just fell right asleep, in my smushed state, lol!
Sounds like a good night in Disneytown!
