Disneyland Hong Kong (Day 1)

I've always described Disneyland as the "Happiest Place on Earth". I think it's a combination of the balloons, the kids, the loud Disney music they play all around and the colourful park. It's my second time in HK Disneyland in a year and I still feel this way about it.

We were all talking over Sat night dinner about how great this trip has been. How we all had so much fun and had so many memories to bring back home but the best part about blogging is that I get to put up some of those memories here to share it with you guys and also to have a place to store those memories forever.

I'm going to tell the story in pictures.

1) We all stayed at the Disneyland Hotel that is made to look like a Victorian style kind of building.

A hotel that Mike very well describes as "cosy but yet grand".

This is a picture of their very grand lobby with a very high ceiling.

I love the rooms too. They typically come with two double beds which I mentioned to Redmummy earlier that it would suit her family of four just nicely.

She was so sweet. You could see how the entire trip she was just thinking about how much her family would have loved the place. At the end of the trip she told me that her dream is no longer branded hand bags or anything like that, but for her to save enough money to bring her family to Disneyland HK for a holiday. What a great mum.

Moving on, I still couldn't get over how much I liked the really cute Disney themed toiletries.

Plus lets not forget my favourite hotel room slippers.

So comfy and cute!

2) Princess, Redmummy, Ringo and I were the first of the group of Nuffnangers to arrive and we arrived a little too early to check-in so we walked around the hotel a little bit.

Took some pictures outside where they have this really beautiful maze. You know the kind of thing you only see in Alice in Wonderland or in the mansions of some really really rich people.

If I'm a rich man one day, my house is going to have a garden maze.

A big one too! With ice-cream in the center to reward anyone who manages to find his way into the middle.

I've always wanted what it was like to go through a maze so I went inside and found my way to the middle.

Before we left at the end of the trip we made sure we took a picture in the maze. See our heads sticking out in the middle of the maze?

Princess was so adorable. You couldn't see any part of her body when she was in the maze. You could only see her head bopping up and down.

The weather was perfect! You know not too hot and not too cold, so it was a lot of fun walking around outside snapping some pictures of the hotel.

3) We all settled down for lunch after our quick expedition to explore the hotel

and soon enough the Singaporean Nuffnangers arrived.

Here's Xiaxue and Mike

I took like 5 full minutes looking in awe at Xiaxue's really blinged up camera and Blackberry. She put every single one of those blings herself manually with glue. Imagine the time it took her.

Here's Singaporean Couple #2: Ming and Estee.

We were all starved. Ming didn't eat a thing on the plane. He has a thing against all plane food. If Ming was stuck on an island, I know he would rather hunt an animal for food than to eat ready made plane food.

After lunch we checked-in. Princess and I lazed around the room for a bit. I wanted to get a bit of sleep but we caught Aladdin on the Disney Channel so we ended up watching the whole movie.

Being in Disneyland really makes you want to watch these classics all over again.

4) Just right when the movie ended, it was time to head downstairs for tea. We met some of the Disneyland staff who are referred to as "Cast members" and they ordered the English Hi-Tea menu for us which included all this food.

It was crazy. They brought like 4-6 of these helpings for all of us. Some of the stuff were really awesome.

Check out the feast!

5) After we had eaten enough to feed a Mongolian army we headed to Disneyland Park.

Rockingdandy tagged along too.

6) When we got there, the first thing we got distracted with was shopping for souvenirs and other Disney merchandise. Man it wasn't even funny how much we all spent on buying Disney stuff just in the 3 days we were there.

Maybe I'll save that for another blog entry but we bought some really cool stuff and the girls were going crazy buying everything from mugs, to notebooks, to shirts, to... even stuff you don't really have a use for but just look nice.

Princess nearly bought this. She didn't though.. because she ended up finding a whole lot of other stuff to buy.

We were all saved from shopping when we were told the Christmas Parade on Main Street was about to start. The crowd was already gathering... waiting for it.

It was so beautiful and I was so impressed that I ended up standing there the whole time just watching the parade... forgetting to take any pictures or videos!

At one point of the parade they turned out all the lights of the Christmas tree only to make them sparkle a little bit and then gradually turn on again all in sync with the Disney kind of music they were playing.

The parade played off the lights off these little hologram goggle things where if you look at the lights through them you'll see a lot of shapes.

Some goggles have heart shapes, some have snow flakes, some have little snow men and the likes. I tried taking a picture with my camera through the goggles but I failed.

Ringo on the other hand, managed to get a picture through the goggles so I'm just going to steal one from her blog. I've posted it at the end of this post.

The back of the goggles read that it's patented so I think you can only find this in Disneyland :)

7) After the parade ended we took a walk around the park and went for the "It's a small world ride". If you've been reading my blog for a while you'll probably know this ride really well by now right?

It's this ride where you sit on a boat and they take you through a canal that has these little dolls singing on the side of it "It's a small world after all... it's a small world after all...".

Different sections of the canal represent different countries. Like these cute little dolls here dressed up in Kimonos represent Japan and they all sing "It's a small world" in Japanese.

During Christmas they have a special section where they dress all the dolls up very Christmas-sy.

8) When we were done with "It's a Small World", we went for Ming's favourite ride of all time... what he calls "The tea cup ride".

Funny huh. You would think for someone as fierce and aggressive as Ming, his favourite ride would be some killer rollercoaster or something but no. His favourite ride is the 'tea-cup ride" where all you do is just spin round and round and round.

I shared a tea-cup with Princess but she got so dizzy I was afraid she would throw up so I didn't dare spin the tea cup any more than it was already spinning.

Ming and Estee on the other hand were spinning their tea-cup so fast it looked like a Tazmanian devil from the distance.

9) The night for us ended the way every magical night in Disneyland ends. With a really nice fireworks display!

Again... the goggles came into play and took the experience to a whole new dimension. Allow me to illustrate. Here's how the fireworks looked like without the goggles.

and here's how it looked like with the goggles.

(Picture stolen from Ringo with permission).

Really really cool huh.

And that everyone... was how our first day at Disneyland Hong Kong ended. With a beautiful fireworks display and loads of happy memories.