TL;DR (well...sorta) SDL Review

[MommaBerd]

I plan to do a longer review, but since I have some time (which has been a rare thing!), I wanted to do a brief update.

~ I ordered SIM cards through the China Unicom website, which directed us to Amazon. No problems whatsoever, with the exception of my phone blowing through 1 GB of data the first night. It was weird, but I adjusted some of the settings on my phone, and I had forgotten to turn it to airplane mode. Since then I haven’t even used another full GB, so I don’t know what happened.

~ Money - ATM is the only way to go. If you want to exchange USD for RMB at a bank, it will take AT LEAST half an hour as they require you to fill out forms and they verify information, etc., etc. Truly, cash is king. Starbucks took an international card, McD’s did not. There were some smaller push carts in the park that did not even take cash, but that was just before the parade.

~ The Shanghai Disneyland Hotel is BEAUTIFUL and Club Level was absolutely divine! Definitely money well spent. My DH wanted to spend all day at the hotel! Food in CL was so delicious. We are breakfast and dinner in CL when we were there. Note that on check-out day, you can only eat breakfast. You can “rest” in the Club, but you cannot have tea or dinner.

~ CMs were delightful and incredibly helpful, especially at the resort. We would just look in their directand they would ask if we needed anything.

~ Weather took a turn for the worse on Thursday, and we were totally unprepared. Rainy, cold, and WINDY - which was the worst part. Because of that and frankly, being dog-tired from our previous touring days, we left the park early, around 3:00. The Chinese visitors, however, were totally prepared and just soldiered on! Though the park wasn’t as crowded as I expect either it to be that day, very few people left when it rained. Wait times were still fairly long.

~ Friday was still cold and cloudy, but the people came in droves. We opted for the Premier Access, which had surge pricing and so they were 990 RMB each!!! CRAZY expensive. The night before when I checked, it was only 330 RMB, so I was shocked. Painful, but worth it. The good news is that they have basically included all FP attractions now. Park sold out/closed I think around midday, and we were only able to get ONE regular FP as soon as we walked in the gates (around 8:30 am), and we chose Tron for 7:15 pm. We would have been miserable without the PA. Honestly, I think if you only have one day, it may be worth it. That way you can tour the park at your leisure and on your schedule. It is really nice to be able to use those FPs whenever you want.

~ We went to see the Jack Sparrow show and then decided not to see anymore shows. Though the stunts they did toward the end of the show were really awesome, it is heavy on the dialogue and we really couldn’t understand the story line all that well. It was mentally taxing to be listening to the show and trying to make sense of it all. But one fun find - if you decide to see the show, there is a pre-show “holding area” that looks like the lobby of an old theatre. In that room are lots of large paintings. We discovered that Jack sparrow is “hidden” in each of the paintings! So that was fun.

~ Bathrooms (toilets as they are called here) - oh my. Prepare yourselves (or your wives) for long lines and squat toilets (and filth if it’s crowded). Since we had been in Hangzhou prior, I had gotten over the squat toilet thing. They do have western toilets, but it’s difficult to wait for just them. Granted we were there on REALLY crowded days, but one line I was in took TEN MINUTES for me to go. Another bathroom, ladies were queuing up at individual stalls. (?) We joke about Disney doing FPs for the bathrooms here in the US, but it might not be a bad idea in Shanghai!!! At the particular toilet that took 10 min, y’all - it was the most disgusting bathroom I think I have been in for this entire trip. And, I can’t blame Disney - if a custodian had tried to close one of the stalls, she probably would have been overrun!

TIP: Pack Clorox wipes, hand sanitizing wipes, and toilet paper - just in case. (I needed the TP more away from the park, but better safe than sorry.)

~ Lines -no real line cutting, but several times in cues where there was a wide turn, people navigated themselves further up the line. Only a couple of times were people unreasonably close. Parade was a different story. It was a full contact sport!

~ I am very glad we went for two days since it was crowded. We didn’t see and do everything - mostly skipped the shows and walk- through attractions...kids just weren’t interested. And, in their defense, there is a LOT of walking.

~ We found the food tasty in the park. We ate at Stargazer Grill and at Toy Box Café. Also, they were having “invited guests” trying out the TSL attractions!

This wasn’t as short as I thought it would be, but I think it hits the high (or low) points. If you have questions, I will try to answer as quickly as I can...

 

[Nomarian]

Great information. Thanks for posting!

Good information on cash and the SIMs. Also, thanks for the posting on the Disneyland Hotel and Club Level. We are booked to do this and I was wondering if it was worth it. Your review totally put me at ease. However, you review of the toilets is going to make my wife pretty unhappy.

I am glad we booked 3 days here even though we are going early midweek and not near a holiday, I wanted to make sure we could take our time going through the park.

Did you use the bins at Tron? Did you feel they were safe?

 

[MommaBerd]

Great information. Thanks for posting!

Good information on cash and the SIMs. Also, thanks for the posting on the Disneyland Hotel and Club Level. We are booked to do this and I was wondering if it was worth it. Your review totally put me at ease. However, you review of the toilets is going to make my wife pretty unhappy.

I am glad we booked 3 days here even though we are going early midweek and not near a holiday, I wanted to make sure we could take our time going through the park.

Did you use the bins at Tron? Did you feel they were safe?

Good idea to book three days - so much better to take a slow pace and enjoy.

I think the toilet situation won’t be AS bad as it was for me, but always better to be prepared.

We tried to use the lockers, but CMs kept telling us that we didn’t need to use lockers because of the bins. I did NOT want to put my camera, money, passports, etc. in the bin. However, we could not get the lockers to work. Another American asked if we knew how to work them as they wanted to use them too and had been trying. The biggest problem was that we couldn’t get our credit card to work. So, ultimately we had to give up and use the bin. I was very nervous, but it all was fine in the end. We

 

[zavandor]

I agree about the Jack Sparrow show, it is mostly a comedy show and being all in Chinese and no translation it's just plainly boring until the last five minutes when the stunts begin. That's the best scene I've ever seen in a stunt show (the storm fight), but I'm not sure if it's worth to go through the whole preshow and show just for that (I am happy I've seen it, though).
It's a shame you didn't watch the Tarzan show, it was awesome and 99% language independent.

 

[MommaBerd]

I agree about the Jack Sparrow show, it is mostly a comedy show and being all in Chinese and no translation it's just plainly boring until the last five minutes when the stunts begin. That's the best scene I've ever seen in a stunt show (the storm fight), but I'm not sure if it's worth to go through the whole preshow and show just for that (I am happy I've seen it, though).
It's a shame you didn't watch the Tarzan show, it was awesome and 99% language independent.

I couldn’t remember which was which, and I didn’t take the time to look it up. :-/ Though in hindsight, given that Tarzan himself didn’t speak much it makes sense that the show would be mostly language independent.

 

[DizDragonfly]

~ I ordered SIM cards through the China Unicom website, which directed us to Amazon. No problems whatsoever, with the exception of my phone blowing through 1 GB of data the first night. It was weird, but I adjusted some of the settings on my phone, and I had forgotten to turn it to airplane mode. Since then I haven’t even used another full GB, so I don’t know what happened.

When was your trip? I've read that the Chinese government is claiming that they are going to "strengthen" the Great Firewall. With the China Unicom SIM card, were you able to get on to Google, or Gmail or Facebook? Thanks!

 

[Simba001]

Thank you for your review. Its helpful to read so we can be prepared.

 

[MommaBerd]

When was your trip? I've read that the Chinese government is claiming that they are going to "strengthen" the Great Firewall. With the China Unicom SIM card, were you able to get on to Google, or Gmail or Facebook? Thanks!

I ordered our SIM cards about a week before our trip - around March 20th, 2018. The Chinese SIM cards provide you with a Chinese phone number, access the local WiFi without incurring additional fees from your US carrier, and enables you to send texts and make local phone calls. I probably should have added that I also used ExpressVPN, which has worked wonderfully! The VPN provides a way for you to circumvent The Great Firewall. I don’t fully understand the technical side of it, but basically it looks as if your device is actually located outside of China and therefore outside of The Great Firewall. China will likely not shut down these VPNs, especially to foreign visitors, as it would greatly impact foreign business travelers. Some small VPNs - maybe even Chinese? - have at times been restricted, but the bigger ones have not seemed to have had any issues.

One thing I also need to say, not necessarily in response to you, is that I would have never needed to use some kind of pocket WiFi or portable WiFi. In fact, I can’t remember seeing that I was ever without a WiFi signal at all.

 

[DizDragonfly]

Thanks for the reply! We have a VPN already (we travel quite a bit and starting using one after my husband's Amazon log on was hacked after logging in at a hotel in Vegas), but I'm hearing really good things about ExpressVPN. It's not crazy expensive, so I think we'll go ahead and get it. I'm planning on bringing my current phone, so I can still get calls and texts from home, but I'm going to bring my old iPhone along too, and will put the SIM card in that one. Best of both worlds. We'll be in Hong Kong for a couple of days, then on the China ABD and at SDL for one extra night. Then we are heading to Tokyo for a few days before coming home. It's a pretty long trip and I don't want to spend $10/day to be able to get online.

 

[Nick6300]

I'm glad you had good trip overall, other than the weather and having to buy the PA. Any issues boarding with your battery pack (in hand or carry-on) or a water bottle (planning on taking a refillable bottle in back pack). They might not let in that water bottle in the park though. That's nuts that the park sold out that early (if it's as spacious as everyone says it is) and your 8:30am FP was already for 715pm. If going more than 1 day, do you recommend buying the PA set or certain attractions (I believe about 5 individual FP purchases = the price of the set). Did they make you empty your pockets for security check ea. time (if you wanted to bring snacks outside of the searched bag). How early did you get to the Disneytown gate/let through?

 

[Agent 86]

We tried to use the lockers, but CMs kept telling us that we didn’t need to use lockers because of the bins. I did NOT want to put my camera, money, passports, etc. in the bin. However, we could not get the lockers to work. Another American asked if we knew how to work them as they wanted to use them too and had been trying. The biggest problem was that we couldn’t get our credit card to work. So, ultimately we had to give up and use the bin. I was very nervous, but it all was fine in the end.

Out of curiosity, what have they done to the lockers at Tron? When we went, which was a while ago now, there were two options - use a coin (which was returned when you opened the locker) or use a locker key where you put the key on your wrist while you ride.

Do they now require you to use a Credit Card? Or an unsecure "bin"? That's pretty odd. Is it the same for Challenge Trails?

And for anyone other future visitors, I would also HIGHLY recommend Tarzan over the Jack Sparrow show. We quite enjoyed the Tarzan show. The pirate show was extremely dull, due to not speaking Chinese, until the last few minutes where it would more action than comedy / verbal jokes based.

 

[MommaBerd]

I'm glad you had good trip overall, other than the weather and having to buy the PA. Any issues boarding with your battery pack (in hand or carry-on) or a water bottle (planning on taking a refillable bottle in back pack). They might not let in that water bottle in the park though. That's nuts that the park sold out that early (if it's as spacious as everyone says it is) and your 8:30am FP was already for 715pm. If going more than 1 day, do you recommend buying the PA set or certain attractions (I believe about 5 individual FP purchases = the price of the set). Did they make you empty your pockets for security check ea. time (if you wanted to bring snacks outside of the searched bag). How early did you get to the Disneytown gate/let through?

I did not have a problem coming in to China with my battery pack; I will let you know how leaving goes...we are on the way to the airport right now.

As for the park, we found we could take water bottles in, but not food. We had a pack of granola that they confiscated. We did not have to empty our pockets, but they did have metal detectors that everyone walked through at bag check.

We never made it for “rope drop” at the Disneytown entrance, we decided to enjoy our amazing breakfast each morning! But there was never a line when we got there.

If you are going for more than one day, I would see what you are able to accomplish on the first day and then determine if you need to buy the PA the next day. I just checked the pricing for the PA for today, and it is only 275 RMB! And, you are right that 5 individual FPs would equal the cost of the PA. However, when we went, everything had surge pricing and it would have only taken 3 individual FPs to equal the cost of the PA. So, it seems that it will all depend on when you go and what the crowds are like.

 

[MommaBerd]

Out of curiosity, what have they done to the lockers at Tron? When we went, which was a while ago now, there were two options - use a coin (which was returned when you opened the locker) or use a locker key where you put the key on your wrist while you ride.

Do they now require you to use a Credit Card? Or an unsecure "bin"? That's pretty odd. Is it the same for Challenge Trails?

And for anyone other future visitors, I would also HIGHLY recommend Tarzan over the Jack Sparrow show. We quite enjoyed the Tarzan show. The pirate show was extremely dull, due to not speaking Chinese, until the last few minutes where it would more action than comedy / verbal jokes based.

I am not sure what was going on with the Tron lockers...we may have just been ignorant in how they worked. But none of the CMs were helpful in showing us how to operate them. Each bank of lockers had a terminal, for lack of a better word, which had very vague instructions and required cash or charge. And, there were no locker keys. So, maybe these are new/different (though they didn’t look new). The cost to rent them was also around $10/60RMB. We never made it to the Challenge Trails (I was the only one who wanted to do them), so I don’t know what they had available.

 

[cschaaf]

Out of curiosity, what have they done to the lockers at Tron? When we went, which was a while ago now, there were two options - use a coin (which was returned when you opened the locker) or use a locker key where you put the key on your wrist while you ride.

Do they now require you to use a Credit Card? Or an unsecure "bin"? That's pretty odd. Is it the same for Challenge Trails?

And for anyone other future visitors, I would also HIGHLY recommend Tarzan over the Jack Sparrow show. We quite enjoyed the Tarzan show. The pirate show was extremely dull, due to not speaking Chinese, until the last few minutes where it would more action than comedy / verbal jokes based.

The 'coin' lockers were the same as the 'key' lockers. You put your stuff in the locker then inserted a coin. The coin released the key. When you returned, you put in the key and turned it; it would open the locker and return your coin. Those lockers were around the perimiter of the locker area.

The lockers in the center are opened and closed by the touchscreens. They used to be free (at least while you rode Tron, they may have charged after a set amount of time, not sure), now they only work if you pay for them.

When we were there, you had to 'release' your locker after you retrieved your stuff. There was a little button on the locker that you had to press to return the locker to 'unused' state. We did not see that button when we got our stuff. When we went back later in the day, after the park had mostly emptied due to a storm, all of the touch-screen lockers showed that they were in use. There was no way that they all were. My guess was that this was a common occurence so they changed the way you store your stuff on Tron.

Now they have little wheelie bins in the boarding area that you put your stuff in.

Challenge Trail lockers are still free according to the SDL site.

@MommaBerd - could you have used the little cubby on the ride vehicle itself?

We also enjoyed the Tarzan show. It was essentially the same thing you'd see if you went to any Chinese acrobatic show.

 

[MommaBerd]

@MommaBerd - could you have used the little cubby on the ride vehicle itself?

No, my bag was too big. :-/ But thankfully it all worked out in the end. I think the locker scene may have been my only CM complaint - when I said I wanted to keep my bag and put it in the locker, they just walked away. Maybe a language barrier, but we tried to get a CM to help us with the lockers a couple of times unsuccessfully.

There are several things I wish I could have seen/done, but kids often determine your course...and being the only female doesn’t help, either.

 

[MommaBerd]

@Nick6300 and anyone else who may be interested, my battery packs/banks made it through security. The labeling is very hard to locate/see, so i pointed it out to the security agent. On the other hand, my TSA-approved little scissors did not make it through. Seriously, they were *maybe* 1-2 mm too long. Oh well. They can be easily replaced. Security was more of an inconvenience than it was strict. And they were actually very patient with us. Trying to get three boys to unpack tablets, phones, DSs, etc. and then repack it was not an easy task.

 

[Nick6300]

@Nick6300 and anyone else who may be interested, my battery packs/banks made it through security. The labeling is very hard to locate/see, so i pointed it out to the security agent. On the other hand, my TSA-approved little scissors did not make it through. Seriously, they were *maybe* 1-2 mm too long. Oh well. They can be easily replaced. Security was more of an inconvenience than it was strict. And they were actually very patient with us. Trying to get three boys to unpack tablets, phones, DSs, etc. and then repack it was not an easy task.

Our battery pack that is maybe 12,000 mah and 5V has a label that is rubbed off, however these stats are etched on the back in white and legible. I will be sure to point it out to them just in case and keep it out in hand. I don't have normal batteries or other electronics in my checked bag, just an electric converter. My cables will be in my carry on back pack. I'm also thinking about smuggling metal paper clips in my carry on for sim changing. Maybe we can find a list of restricted items.

 

[Nick6300]

I did not have a problem coming in to China with my battery pack; I will let you know how leaving goes...we are on the way to the airport right now.

As for the park, we found we could take water bottles in, but not food. We had a pack of granola that they confiscated. We did not have to empty our pockets, but they did have metal detectors that everyone walked through at bag check.

We never made it for “rope drop” at the Disneytown entrance, we decided to enjoy our amazing breakfast each morning! But there was never a line when we got there.

If you are going for more than one day, I would see what you are able to accomplish on the first day and then determine if you need to buy the PA the next day. I just checked the pricing for the PA for today, and it is only 275 RMB! And, you are right that 5 individual FPs would equal the cost of the PA. However, when we went, everything had surge pricing and it would have only taken 3 individual FPs to equal the cost of the PA. So, it seems that it will all depend on when you go and what the crowds are like.

I think I'm going to just use the big bins at Tron for my bag, and keep passport, phone, wallet on me or in cubby if it seems like nothing will fall out. Most of my cargo shorts have buttons/zip up. There were some articles that suggested doing Rapids (think it's closed for maintenance) and Challenge Trails first because of shortage of lockers. I was leaning more towards Rapids early in the am since this was typically 3rd longest wait times behind Soaring and 7DMT but not sure I want to get drenched 1st thing in the am. Hopeful that it's warm enough/dry in 2 weeks.

Different that they let you go through metal detector without emptying your pockets.

I've only seen the SDL web site posted PA prices (I thought something like 670 CNY/RMB), that's interesting that it actually fluctuates that much on the app while there. If only 275/330 I'd prob. buy it regardless.

I typically try to be on an attraction during parades but if I'm trapped during one, maybe I'll catch some of it. I would like to find a good spot for the fireworks. I had been planning on seeing all of the shows (like Frozen) but that makes sense that some of them like the Pirates might not be worth it if mostly all dialogue. The canoes, boat ride, dumbo, carousel, and spinning rides I was thinking about skipping.

Where there certain must have merchandise at the park/disneytown stores? Did you visit the Bund/Y. Garden and thought either was worthwhile? I think my hostel is near the Bund and I'd be walking. Not sure what else I'm doing in Shanghai yet.

 

[disneymouse16]

Are the crowds just completely unmanageable? My sister and I are going to be there May 2, 3. She just informed me she found it is a holiday but we can't change (she is volunteering in China with medically fragile orphans and this is the the she has off). I'm trying to brace myself. Pretty much forget doing the headliners if you don't have the Premier Access? Not sure I can talk my sister into spending that much.

 

[Nomarian]

Are the crowds just completely unmanageable? My sister and I are going to be there May 2, 3. She just informed me she found it is a holiday but we can't change (she is volunteering in China with medically fragile orphans and this is the the she has off). I'm trying to brace myself. Pretty much forget doing the headliners if you don't have the Premier Access? Not sure I can talk my sister into spending that much.

From everything I have read and watched, the two times to avoid going is either during a weekend or a Holiday with the Holidays being the worse. In my mind, I would probably expect wait times of 100+ minutes for the big rides. The other issue is that they also do surge pricing now, so the cost of the ticket and Premier Access will be very high. I don't envy you, but I am sure you could manage it.