Day 9 - Part 1 - Our worst Disney Day!
Because of how good we'd had it on Thursday with crowds at the park, we had decided to relax our schedule this morning, leaving the hotel at 8:10am for a 9am opening, getting to the park about 8:20am. With the crowds we'd experienced the afternoon before we figured it wasn't a busy time at the park. We were wrong in our thinking! I don't know why, but from one Thursday to the next day, Friday, things changed so much. The Spring Festival (Chinese New Year) crowds suddenly appeared at the park! It took us 40 minutes to get through the security check point and in the gates, we got in right as the park opened but missed rope drop completely and were behind enormous crowds already streaming into the park!
I did forget to mention, the day before at the ticketing gate we discovered another stupid mis-managed process at Shanghai
Disneyland. We had a ticket voucher we booked online, but we needed proper tickets to get into the park, and there was no guest services area to exchange the tickets. After finding a CM to ask we were told this would be done at the entry gate, which would have been fine, except there was a whole process the staff at the entry gate was required to do to provide you you're tickets (including checking your Passport). Because of this the lines to enter the park moved SO slowly! It would make much more sense to have a separate line at a Guest Services or a Ticketing window for this part of the process (like other parks!). In addition, as we were visiting for two lots of 2 days (you can only buy up to 2 day passes, and all passes are dated) we would have to do this again when we went in on Sunday! The process is also further complicated as staff have to check the dates of your ticket to make sure they match the actual date of visit. Anyway, we didn't have to go through this process the second day, but many other people did, so of course the lines moved ridiculous slowly!
Anyway, we had finally gotten into the park and we thought we'd try go to get Fastpasses for Soaring Over the Horizon, as we knew it was the longest wait in the park. For some reason that particular day Faspass distribution wasn't available, and the wait for the attraction was already 120 minutes! So we decided to skip it and instead make it a priority the next day (we knew thanks to signage Fastpass would be up and running again the next day (Sunday), and we already had plans to show up much earlier the next morning!).
After wasting time finding out there were no Soaring Fastpasses available we headed over to our second preference Fastpass, Seven Dwarves Mine Train. This had the second longest waits during our visit (Roaring Rapids was closed) and was usually longer than TRON, plus we'd experienced TRON the night before. We cut through Gardens of Imagination to get to Fantasyland and saw something that made our stressed out selves smile - a leaf Mickey!
We got to the Seven Dwarfs Mine Train Fastpass distribution station, but of course it was well past opening by now and there was a long wait. It took us about 15 minutes to get the Fastpass. Like I said, it was really silly that they only had 1 Fastpass distribution area in each land/area - well they actually had two in Fantasyland but rather than splitting the attractions across them (i.e. Seven Dwarfs on one - as it was most popular, and Peter Pan and Winnie the Pooh on the other), everything was on both! In addition there were only 7 distribution machines at the second Fantasyland Guest Services location (where we were) so it's no wonder distribution went so slowly! Plus, the Chinese guests seemed really confused how to work the machines, and the system was way more complicated then it needed to be (especially with multiple choices for the ride you wanted)! Anyway, we finally managed a Fastpass and the strangest thing happened, something that has never happened to me before. We must have been on the cusp of a new Fastpass distribution window because my ticket got a Fastpass for 11:55am - 12:55am and Jared's got 12:00pm - 1:00pm. It wasn't really a big deal, we just both waited until after 12, but it was such an interesting thing to see I had to take a picture!
At this point the SDL wait times app told us TRON was still only at 10 minutes, so we decided to rush over to ride it. On our way through we did notice that the Fantasyland attractions (other than Seven Dwarves Mine Train) were still only posting 5 minute waits. When we got to TRON however the wait was at 30 minutes (turns out we hadn't refreshed the app
) and we decided we didn't want to wait that long just now, so we thought we'd head back to Fantasyland where Peter Pan had only posted a 5 minute wait. Of course by the time we got back the wait was 20 minutes! We were a little annoyed with ourselves here as we could have avoided a longer wait by just refreshing the app! Then we became even more annoyed when we saw guests going under ropes in the queue to skip past people in the line. As we got towards the end of the queue one lady even opened a closed gate and skipped nearly 70% of the line! After that she was on the phone to other people in her party trying to get them to do the same. When they didn't get to the gate before she was out of site of it to show them where to enter the line, she left her daughter (who was maybe 8 or 9) alone in line and was then not with her when she got to the front of the queue! The CM's had to make her wait until her mum caught up! So much of this fumed me! Not only did they blatantly try and bend the rules that applied to everyone else for them (i.e. we all had to wait in that line!), she then abandoned her daughter to try and help other people skip the wait too! This was without a doubt the worst instance of line cutting we saw in the parks, and it made me wonder why there weren't more CM's policing these gates and roped off areas (the gate in question was literally right next to the attraction entrance!). I would have said something to this lady but I don't speak Mandarin, and the other guests in line didn't seem to care!
We rode Peter Pan only once on the trip, thanks to consistently long lines and our lack of concern at prioritising it as the first or second Fastpass of the day. The attraction was definitely an improvement on the US versions, the movement of the figures (some of which were AA's) and the integration of screens and other effects really added to the experience of what is already one of my favourite Disney dark rides! The 'rollercoaster' style track they used also seemed to add smoother movement, and allowed you to speed up and slow down easier depending on the scene you were visiting. I wish I had gotten to ride this attraction again, as it hasn't stuck in my head as much as other rides at the park!
After the ride I realised I had left certain feminine hygiene products required for the day in the hotel room! The day had pretty much been a disaster already up to this point, and I felt like a complete failure as I knew if I had planned for busier crowds, gotten to the park early, and not forgotten something in the hotel it wouldn't have been as bad! Still when planning for Shanghai Disney I didn't have any idea the kind of crowds we'd be facing in mid-January (honestly I had thought with actual Chinese New Year being at the end of the month it would still be ok, I didn't know about the Spring Festival holiday). So I was pretty distraught realising we'd have to go back to the hotel (because there was no where in the part that sold/distributed these products!). We left the park at 10:30am, and lines were still crazy for people trying to enter the park. When we came back we decided to eat lunch at Downtown Disney because it would be less manic. We also thought it would allow the crowds of people still waiting to get into the park to die down. It didn't really, and we had a bit of a wait to get back into the park! We planned to try for a TRON Fastpass before heading to our Seven Dwarves Mine Train Fasspass, but when we got to the Fastpass Distribution area there were people EVERYWHERE, the line looked ridiculously long, the passes weren't until 7-8pm, and we were about to miss our Seven Dwarves Mine Train Fasspass window so we sadly hurried into Fantasyland without a pass.
When we got to Seven Dwarves Mine Train the wait was 150 minutes, so we at least felt we could make good use of the one Fastpass we had gotten for the day! We only had to wait 15 minutes so this Fastpass was well worth it.
The ride itself was very similar to the US version, though with a different end scene and different views on the outside portion of the ride (the inside portion was the same I believe). We love this ride, it's great fun, so we enjoyed ourselves on it!
When we exited Seven Dwarves Mine Train the crowds had become oppressive!! They only time I've ever felt that pegged in and crowded was in Tokyo on a previous trip to the Senso-Ji Temple on a public holiday called Culture Day. There, the narrow walkway to the temple was overrun with Japanese visiting the temple to celebrate the festival, but the crowd levels were in part due to the narrowness of the path. Here, the paths were wide with plenty of space for crowds, however this day even the space provided by Disney for the crowds of Shanghai did not seem adequate! Here is a shot of the walkway through Fantasyland. Yes, this is a walkway and is not comprised of lines or people waiting for anything, just simply people moving from point A to point B!
We headed over to Pirates of the Caribbean to find it down (seriously we were having the worst run of luck this day). By this point I was thoroughly overwhelmed by the crowds, completely depressed by the disaster that was this day and so confused how the wait times could be as high as some of the waits I'd seen on the app during opening week! After resting in Treasure Cove for a while we decided we couldn't cope with my more this day and for the first time ever we decided to ditch out on a Disney park early! It was really that bad! After a bit more thought we decided we'd at least stay to watch some shows, and get them out the way, as I had heard with the huge capacity of Shanghai Disneyland's theatre's it was pretty easy to see shows at the park! We went to get into the 1:30pm show (at 1) but it was completely full, so we decided to take pictures around Treasure Cove while we waited for the 2pm show. There was also a showing of Tarzan at 3:45, so we decided we'd do both those shows and then head out.
The picture taking was actually fun, though it wasn't the best day for it, and it relaxed me again!
We found a Photopass photographer in Treasure Cove, which was great!
Once again they were great at coming up with poses for us to try. This one was supposed to be a heart I think!
Continued in Next Post...