WDWguru
aka tivogirl, keeper of the live WDW webcams at ht
- Joined
- Jun 29, 2001
- Messages
- 2,354
(This is pasted from my blog, so excuse the explanations I included for non-DIS folks. Also, TONS of pics at http://www.mcdanieldesk.com/HKDisney if you're interested.)
We got in to the Hollywood Hotel at Hong Kong Disneyland just after midnight and got checked in. Our non-smoking, king bed, park view room was waiting for us. The hotel and the room are very art deco, 1920s-30s-40s Hollywood themed and is nice.
The other hotel - the Disneyland Hotel - is just like a miniature version of the Grand Floridian in Orlando.
We got up early and headed to the gates an hour before the 9:30 open, just as we'd done in Tokyo. This time, instead of a throng of people waiting, we found nobody. NObody there on Christmas morning! So we walked the paths around to the Disneyland Hotel and had some breakfast, then came back to the park about 9:15. Main Street was open, so we went in and checked out the shops (bought a nice ring at the jeweler) and joined the crowd waiting just before the castle for opening.
There were maybe 100 people there total - unreal! The US parks are notoriously crowded this week, often closing to capacity, so we weren't sure what to expect. This was a nice surprise. We didn't encounter much of any crowds until about 2 in the afternoon. Even then the longest wait we saw was 50 minutes, and that was for the short window of the English version of Stitch Encounter.
The park itself is quite small and many details are similar to Disneyland (the smaller castle, the train seating, etc) but there is lots of room for expansion. It's quite well organized, the staff is great and it's very clean. Our favorites were Stitch Encounter (like Turtle Talk with Crush at Epcot - an animated character interacts with a live audience) and Space Mountain (smoother and faster than the WDW version, and synched to a Buck Rogers-esque soundtrack. We basically had the park finished in a few hours - most of the rides and shows are the same as at other parks or things we've seen on the cruise line, so we hit our favorites and the new stuff and then did a LOT of shopping.
I've been collecting this line of adorable character merchandise that we find rarely at the US parks called Cuties. We expected to find them all over Tokyo, but did not. Apparently Hong Kong is where they've been hiding them all. AND unlike the Tokyo parks, they are into pins here, so we did quite well. So well, we had to get a locker -- that's an interesting process here. There are computers that control a whole wall of lockers. You plug in your money, then it assigns you a locker and unlocks it. You put your stuff in, push the button on it to lock it, then it spits out a receipt with a code. Any time you want to get into the locker, you access the computer screen and type in the code, then it unlocks the locker. The nice thing is you can get in and out of it as many times as you need to, and you don't have to carry a key.
We finished early, so walked over to the pier and took some photos of part of the skyline we could see. We ate a great dinner at one of the lounges in our hotel, where they gave us Mickey and Minnie Santa hats to keep, then went up to the room to watch the fireworks from our window.
While we've decided nobody gets into Disney like the Japanese, this is our favorite park outside the Florida parks. We're excited to see it expand in the coming years and will definitely be back when it does.
We got in to the Hollywood Hotel at Hong Kong Disneyland just after midnight and got checked in. Our non-smoking, king bed, park view room was waiting for us. The hotel and the room are very art deco, 1920s-30s-40s Hollywood themed and is nice.
The other hotel - the Disneyland Hotel - is just like a miniature version of the Grand Floridian in Orlando.
We got up early and headed to the gates an hour before the 9:30 open, just as we'd done in Tokyo. This time, instead of a throng of people waiting, we found nobody. NObody there on Christmas morning! So we walked the paths around to the Disneyland Hotel and had some breakfast, then came back to the park about 9:15. Main Street was open, so we went in and checked out the shops (bought a nice ring at the jeweler) and joined the crowd waiting just before the castle for opening.
There were maybe 100 people there total - unreal! The US parks are notoriously crowded this week, often closing to capacity, so we weren't sure what to expect. This was a nice surprise. We didn't encounter much of any crowds until about 2 in the afternoon. Even then the longest wait we saw was 50 minutes, and that was for the short window of the English version of Stitch Encounter.
The park itself is quite small and many details are similar to Disneyland (the smaller castle, the train seating, etc) but there is lots of room for expansion. It's quite well organized, the staff is great and it's very clean. Our favorites were Stitch Encounter (like Turtle Talk with Crush at Epcot - an animated character interacts with a live audience) and Space Mountain (smoother and faster than the WDW version, and synched to a Buck Rogers-esque soundtrack. We basically had the park finished in a few hours - most of the rides and shows are the same as at other parks or things we've seen on the cruise line, so we hit our favorites and the new stuff and then did a LOT of shopping.
I've been collecting this line of adorable character merchandise that we find rarely at the US parks called Cuties. We expected to find them all over Tokyo, but did not. Apparently Hong Kong is where they've been hiding them all. AND unlike the Tokyo parks, they are into pins here, so we did quite well. So well, we had to get a locker -- that's an interesting process here. There are computers that control a whole wall of lockers. You plug in your money, then it assigns you a locker and unlocks it. You put your stuff in, push the button on it to lock it, then it spits out a receipt with a code. Any time you want to get into the locker, you access the computer screen and type in the code, then it unlocks the locker. The nice thing is you can get in and out of it as many times as you need to, and you don't have to carry a key.
We finished early, so walked over to the pier and took some photos of part of the skyline we could see. We ate a great dinner at one of the lounges in our hotel, where they gave us Mickey and Minnie Santa hats to keep, then went up to the room to watch the fireworks from our window.
While we've decided nobody gets into Disney like the Japanese, this is our favorite park outside the Florida parks. We're excited to see it expand in the coming years and will definitely be back when it does.
