Mickey's Not-So-Scary Halloween Party!

Last night I went to MNSSHP with a few of my friends, and it was a blast! Tickets are cheaper for cast members in September, so as weird as it was celebrating Halloween so early, it was definitely worth it. One of the nice things about being here so long is that rides weren't really a focus that night (because we have plenty of time for the next few months to ride them), even though most were open, so we were able to focus on watching the special events and meeting characters.

   I dressed up as Velma once again, since it's a pretty easy costume to throw together from Goodwill finds.

 

Together we solve mysteries!

I went with my Jungle Cruise friend Andrew, since Bernice was still at work when the party first started. He went as Andy from Toy Story, and then while on the bus he started talking to the girl sitting in the row ahead of us, and we found out she's from Mesa and attended MCC! Her name was Chelsey, and we hadn't ever met at MCC, but since she was going to the party alone she ended up hanging out with us for the rest of the night.

So earlier just last week, my roommates and I had gone around one night and determined which Disney character we were most like. We said it would be awesome if we could take pictures with "our" character by the end of our program, but mine was Jane from Tarzan, and I had never heard of her being around the parks before. So, that night Andrew, Chelsey, and I are walking towards Adventureland, and who do we see?

 

Jane and Terk! 

So of course I flip out and we immediately get in line and I talked to her for a little bit and she was just freaking adorable. We had been at the party for maybe fifteen minutes and already it was totally awesome. I hadn't ever taken the time to meet characters at the parks before, and I had always been a little worried that the magic would be ruined a bit, since I had seen characters backstage at Animal Kingdom quite a bit before, but earlier in the day Andrew and I had gone to Magic Kingdom to buy our tickets, and I mentioned I hadn't ever met Mickey yet, so we did that and as soon as he and Minnie came into view I felt like I was five years old again.

 So much fun! Anyway, at the party, after we met Jane and Terk, we went to grab some candy, and then to watch the parade. I tried to take a lot of pictures, but they turned out pretty bad...

 

These guys were really freaking cool, even though the picture is terrible; they were gravediggers from the Haunted Mansion!

Immediately after the parade was the Villains' Mix and Mingle show, which was basically just a little dance show for all the villains in front of the castle, and then afterwards you could meet them and take pictures.

 

Dr. Facilier from Princess and the Frog was featured the most, but quite a few villains made cameo appearances.

 

Bernice (aka Lilo) had met up with us just before the Villains show, so the three of us got a picture with Captain Hook immediately after.

 

Again, almost immediately after the show were the special fireworks, so we stayed in the same spot and enjoyed those, and met up with my friend/another Jungle Skipper, Marcie. We got briefly separated from Andrew, so us four girls went on Space Mountain.

 I think this is the best ride photo I've ever seen.

As I mentioned before, rides weren't really a priority, so we only went on three or four...not too shabby. After Space Mountain, we wandered around to find more candy and characters...

 

Andy found all his toys, and Lilo met Stitch! We were getting pretty exhausted at this point (almost midnight), so we left as the park closed and headed home. Overall, a totally awesome event, and I'm tempted to go again, but it's far more expensive in October, so it probably won't happen.

Tomorrow's the cast preview for EPCOT's Food and Wine Festival, which is when  a bunch of extra countries set up booths in the World Showcase and people can "eat around the world", so Bernice, our coworker Ryan, and I are going after work. Should be a ton of fun!

Kwa herini!

A Day in the Life: Kilimanjaro Driver Edition

   So after my last post, Nicole commented and said she wanted to know more about my day-to-day life. I have no idea why; my day-to-day life is really boring and repetitive. However, I aim to please, so I decided to keep a record of what I did all day today. The following is everything I wrote down during the course of the day; enjoy!


 8:23; Wake up way before my alarm because apparently I can't sleep in long after 8:00 anymore.

8:30; Get informed by Bernice (roommate and other Kilimanjaro driver) that someone decided to take a bath last night, and now our shower head isn't working. She has work at 10:00, so she lets me know she left a bucket in there for me to use as a shower and leaves to catch a bus. Excellent start to the morning.

8:58; Think about having some cereal, then realize I haven't had a chance to buy milk yet and the roommate who promised to buy two gallons for everyone has yet to do so. Settle for oatmeal instead.

9:05- 9:25; I shower with a bucket. Verdict: it isn't nearly as adventurous and charmingly rustic as it sounds. It's a pain in the butt. Two stars.

10:05; Leave to catch the bus for work. My shift doesn't start until 11:30, but our CP bus system is awful and you have to take a bus that is at least an hour ahead of your shift in case the bus is late/breaks down (both happen frequently).

11:30- 12:05; I clock in and wait in the break room for a little while. Most attractions have an automatic assignment system, but since our trucks don't run on an exact schedule and there are often unexpected  animal stops, coordinators manipulate our system to give assignments. I am put on a truck first thing that day.

12:06- 1:35; I'm on a truck for about 3 rounds; the first two are uneventful, while on the third round there's a foreign man with a camera who refuses to sit. We're required to tell them to sit at least three times, and then of they stand after the third time, it's at their own risk and we're not liable. So about halfway through the safari he had already stood two other times, and I tell everyone to remain seated at the beginning of my spiel, so he was pas

1:35- 1:50; fifteen minute break. Nothing eventful occurs.

1:55; I am sent out on another truck. People obey the rules pretty well, so I zone out for a bit. Baby white rhino is spotted and there is a giant chorus of 'AWWWW'. Baby white rhino owns everybody and he knows it. When he runs it's like he doesn't know how his legs work. Adorable.

3:25; Time for my 45 minute lunch. There is a news story about Kate Middleton on the tv, so I get into a discussion of her style with a bunch of other female CPs. This somehow develops into a conversation about the Olympics and we spend the rest of break Googling the most attractive male gymnasts.  Break well spent.

4:00; I am assigned a land position as my last spot of the day, loading people into rows before they get on the truck. This is easily my least favorite position, but as the park closes at six I won't be here too long. I try to start an enthusiastic conversation with a little blond girl, but I find out she only speaks French and so I end up feeling like a moron.

6:00; Last safari loads, so I am free to hop on the next truck to get a ride back to base. I contemplate taking a picture of the triceratops painted to resemble a bongo (the animal on our safari, not the instrument) that sits on the side of the road backstage, but decide I'd rather not be fired. No Bongosaurus for my blog.

The majestic bongo.

6:05-6:33; I'm off at 6:45, but there's nothing else to do around base so I get an early release to catch the CP bus.

6:35; My fellow safari driver Brooke and I have just started walking for the bus when it starts pouring. Both of us have no raingear, so we're forced to keep walking and make sure we make the bus, rather than wait it out. Obviously we end up getting soaked, and we enjoy a freezing cold bus ride home.

7:27; I arrive home, change out of my costume, and make some frozen chicken alfredo. Remember that I had planned to do this blog, and get on the internet. Make vague plans with roommate Bri and friend Andrew for my day off tomorrow. Eat more things. Eventually sleep.

See, this is why I didn't talk about my day-to-day stuff...it's boring! Tomorrow is my day off though...maybe I'll do a Day in the Life; No Work Edition. Oh! And I forgot to mention the Safari Stampede! Tomorrow pretty much everyone who works at KSR is participating in this thing called the Safari Stampede, which is a 'Great Race' type event with physical and mental challenges. There's a bunch of teams of four, so Bernice and I and our friends Christian and Franki are the Bangin' Bongos, and it's going to be awesome! It's taking place at Fort Wilderness at about 6, and there's going to be food and then afterwards we get to stay over at the Fort. Pretty cool stuff; I'll make sure to take lots of pictures!

Kwa herini!

In which I am terrible at updating (and almost die by white rhino)

     Can you blame me, though? For me it's just the same job, day in and out. Working at Disney has lost most of the glamor (although I still really love my job, it doesn't seem noteworthy anymore so I forget to write about it). Of course, plenty of exciting things still happen; no surprise, considering the animals I work with.
        We have a baby white rhino that's a few months old that's been on show for about a month now, and the mother is very, very protective of her baby, and safari drivers are under strict instructions to not get between mother and the calf. So today I am driving normally past two other white rhinos, when mom and baby suddenly come barreling out of the bushes on one side of the path. I stop immediately, not only because they're obviously in the way, but images of being gored to death by this white rhino flash into my head and mother rhino is staring me down like a hawk. They actually have really terrible eyesight, but I momentarily forgot this, considering I was too busy being terrified. After a few moments (during which the guests were completely enraptured with baby rhino and were chattering nonstop and I tried to pretend like I hadn't just almost peed my pants. Our trucks can withstand a rhino ramming it, but I'd rather not test that), the pair moved calmly off the path and I was able to continue on my way.
          So, yes, I guess exciting things are happening (did I tell you about the time I accidentally rammed the unloading dock? Yeah. Let's not talk about it. Before you ask, the truck wasn't even damaged. The unloading dock....minimally so), but that sort of thing happens to everyone on Kilimanjaro, so people are always topping each other's stories and you forget that it's not a normal occurrence for everyone else. Although, I have to admit I feel a tiny bit smug when my roommates come home and their biggest complaint is that the condiment machine stopped working. I get to watch baby elephants play in the rain and giraffes chase antelope...the bad moments tend to get overshadowed by all the awesome things I am fortunate enough to see.
     For example, I got off my lunch break today and bumped someone off a truck to do a few rounds. I do one safari, and as we're nearing the end it starts sprinkling a little bit. Not a big deal; it looked like it would clear up in a few minutes. Not so; literally about a minute after I dropped off my first round of guests, rain started pouring down. And I mean like pre-hurricane level rain....rain so hard you actually couldn't see clearly. It was absolutely nuts. We have certain parts along the path where we go through water, but nearly every part of that path that wasn't on a downward slope was flooded. Luckily for us (safari drivers, anyway), we have clear plastic windows that roll down and protect our radio/audio equipment and keep us dry, but guests have no such luck: it's a completely open-air truck, minus a canvas canopy overhead. For the most part, the animals don't mind normal rain (unless it's a steady, rain-all-day type thing; then they hate it), especially after it's been hot during the day (which it has), but I don't think anyone expected the amount of rain we got. The elephants usually love it though, and they were playing in the water for quite a bit.
    My days off are still primarily spent at the parks; last week (two weeks ago? I don't even know anymore) I went to the two water parks for the very first time with Jordan, my friend Andrew, and his friend Marcie. We first went to Blizzard Beach, which is known for the Summit Plummet, one of those pretty much vertical slides that shoots you down and give you a major wedgie now matter how minor  the drop. Well, the drop on Summit is hardly minor; I'm pretty sure it's the tallest slide of its kind at 120 feet. I counted how long the entire ride took at one point...it's about 10 seconds, but I swear it almost feels much longer. You slide down so fast I almost lost one of my contacts at one point! It's the tallest point in the park, obviously, and as you climb the stairs to the top you can actually look out and see all the landmarks in all the other parks (Expedition Everest and the Tree of Life in AK; Tower of Terror and the Sorcerer's Hat in HS; Spaceship Earth in Epcot, and you can just  barely see Space Mountain and the castle out in Magic Kingdom) what makes it even freakier is that from your perspective it looks like the slide is actually taller than all of these (it's definitely not, I know at least Everest is 199 feet).
        Blizzard Beach is definitely the place to go for slides, but Typhoon Lagoon has a cool atmosphere as well. They have a little saltwater pool where you can snorkel among sharks, and their wave pool is terrifying. You can tell when a wave is coming because it makes a giant, roaring WHOOMPF noise and everybody around you will start screaming. The water parks closed at five, and we had gone right at the park's opening, so we were pretty exhausted by this point and Jordan had left before we went to Typhoon to get ready for a party the housing committee was throwing. So the three of us decided to go to the Polynesian resort to have some Dole whip (the Polynesian is really awesome because they have a beach right by their little man-made lagoon with hammocks and beach chairs and it's just really nice) and lie out on the hammocks. At this point we were all kind of dead and the weather was really nice so we ended up staying on the beach for a few hours just napping, and it was pretty fantastic.

    I took a solo trip to Magic Kingdom the next day, which wasn't nearly as fun as I had planned, but I was able to get some birthday/Christmas shopping done. Halloween's already started up in full swing at the Magic Kingdom, so the roommates and I are planning to go to Mickey's Not-So-Scary Halloween Party around the end of September (when tickets are cheaper, ha). Two of the girls and I had planned on being the ballroom dancers from the Haunted Mansion, but Kelsea and I, on our quest to find Goodwill dresses, ended up empty handed. So we fell back on our second options, which was awesome female detectives; Kelsea's going as Nancy Drew and I'm going to be Velma from Scooby Doo once again. We've all been talking about going to Islands of Adventure at some point to visit the Wizarding World of Harry Potter, but that'll probably happen in October.
   Not much going on beyond that, but I'm thinking about doing a video soon focusing on a day in the life of a Kilimanjaro driver ;P
Until then,
Kwa herini!