Traditions!

  So as you can probably guess by the title, today was our Traditions day (Traditions being the first day of general training that everybody who gets hired goes through, regardless of your role or where you're working). It's held in Disney University nearby the Magic Kingdom, and holy wow was it long. 8 AM until about 1:30 PM....lots and lots of watching tedious videos. Of course, this is Disney we're talking about, so there were a few surprises, including a quick trip to a pretty magical place :)
  
     And, of course, today was the day I received my Cast member ID and nametag, so now I'm official!

 Super freaking exciting....and the more I hear about Kilimanjaro, the more excited I get! Everyone who works there/has worked there says they love it. I don't want to give a lot of the secrets of Traditions away, so I'll have to end the description there :]

There were two different Traditions sessions, and myself and two of my roommates (Hannah and Bernice) had the earlier one that began at 8, while the rest of my roomies had  the later session at 1:00. Of course, this meant that Hannah, Bernice and I had more free time to go to the parks, so we rushed home after Traditions to change and have some lunch, then we were off to the Magic Kingdom! This was the first time we'd ever had to try and get to the main gate of the park, so we had a little bus trouble, but we ended up at the Grand Floridian Resort, and from there took a monorail to the park (didn't take a picture this time, but I'll have to do so soon; the Grand Floridian is gorgeous and probably my favorite resort, architecture-wise).

We got to the Magic Kingdom right as the end of the three o' clock parade was passing by the train station at the front of the park, so people were tightly packed along the edges of the sidewalk and we had to duck into a store to avoid the heat and make our way up Main Street. I felt bad rushing Hannah to the rides since it was her first time in a Disney park ever, but we did pause for some shots of the castle.

  

Aaand that was, sadly, the only photo I got of my Magic Kingdom adventure the entire day....
I know, I know, I gotta make sure I capture all the moments!

Anyway, Hannah said Bernice and I should just lead her to all of our favorite rides, so we decided to go on Pirates of the Caribbean first. We passed the Enchanted Tiki Room, and since we were all pretty sweaty from the bus (and then from fighting through the crowds on Main Street), we decided to watch a show (it is a Disney classic, after all...)

Afterwards we went on Pirates, Big Thunder Mountain, the Haunted Mansion, It's A Small World, and Splash Mountain in a pretty quick succession. We actually rode Mansion twice in a row, as it started raining pretty heavily just as we got out of our first ride-through, and of course afterwards figured it'd be a great idea to ride a water ride right after a rainstorm.

Wasn't too bad, though...rain doesn't really cool anything down; just makes it muggier. Blergh humidity.

We had dinner afterwards, with plans to go to Tomorrowland for Space Mountain, but met up with Bernice's friend Andrew and his friend Sam (both of them have been working in Disney for a couple months already; Sam's actually a Kilimanjaro person too, so he was able to tell us a lot of helpful stuff about our first day of training!), who advised us not to go on Space Mountain. Sure enough, as we passed by it on our way to another ride, it turns out Space Mountain had been shut down for a little bit. Instead, we rode the PeopleMover, a pretty slow ride that goes on a track above Tomorrowland through some out-of-date "scenes of the future" and the interior of Space Mountain. I had never been on the PeopleMover before, and it was actually pretty cool...since Space Mountain was shut down, the lights were on in the building, and we were given a sort of accidental backstage look at the workings of the ride. Definitely very cool.

Bernice and I had agreed during the day to try and get home earlier so we could get plenty of sleep for our Animal Kingdom training on Sunday, so we decided to forgo fireworks and headed to the Polynesian Resort to get some of the famous Dole Whip (basically pineapple soft-serve ice cream) and ride home.

Tomorrow (well, today, now) is Animal Kingdom training...and we get to ride Kilimanjaro! 

I apologize for the dull, list-type of writing I'm doing...all my blog posts seem to be done at one in the morning and my brain refuses to write creatively. Ah well. Hopefully it'll get better once I have a more regular schedule!