[This trip report was originally posted to the Disboards.]
July 7 & 8, 2018
We left home bright and early at 7 am for the 3 hour drive to Toronto. It’s construction season in Ontario, Canada where we live, and we didn’t know what to expect for highway closures. As we left home, we received notice of a 75 minute delay on highway 401 about 10 km away from the airport due to a spill of some sort. Luckily, it was cleaned up by the time we got there, and we had no major delays.
Our flight left pretty much on time at 1 pm, and despite it being 14 hours nonstop on Air Canada from Toronto to Shanghai… the flight was not as bad as I’d expected. We all watched several movies and tried to sleep. I found the seats to be quite comfortable, and my back didn’t hurt at all. Usually it’s killing me after just a few hours in most seats.
We were served a hot lunch shortly after takeoff, and an ‘evening snack’ of noodle cups and sandwiches. The noodle cups came with chopsticks, and the kids thought that was awesome – a great start to our China adventure.
One aspect of the flight that disappointed me was that rather than flying east or west to Shanghai, we took the polar route, up over Alaska and the Arctic circle into Russia – but the flight crew maintained a strict ‘windows closed’ policy on the aircraft so that passengers could sleep. I would have liked to look out over those parts of the world (especially since it was still daytime when we passed over them) but was unable to.
We landed around 3 pm on Sunday, and taxied to the gate, and everyone was up out of their seats – and then the pilot came over the PA system and announced that he had to back the plane up 1 foot to fit the apron lines, which had been freshly repainted. So we had to wait for everyone to re-stow their luggage and be seated again. Groan.
We finally got off the plane. It was easy enough to get through health check, finger printing, immigration and customs. Truthfully, it didn’t feel all that different from the Toronto airport. Our driver from Mr. Orange was waiting for us with a sign. We had pre-booked most of our transfers from airport or train station to hotel with this car service in multiple cities across China. This saved a lot of time and confusion in getting on our way quickly after landing or disembarking, and was a great decision we had made in planning our trip.
It was an easy drive to Disneyland with no traffic – less than half an hour. We checked in at the Toy Story Hotel.
We had booked our hotel stay separately from our park tickets, and wanted to take advantage of an offer that gives guests who book both together through the Disney website. The advantage includes an extra Fastpass to use in the park, as well as access to the park through a separate entrance for hotel guests only that would be a great time saver. We had booked both parts of our package through the official Disney website, just not at the same time; but only because we booked our hotel stay back in February to ensure availability, and park tickets weren’t released until June.
We knew Shanghai Disneyland was going to be crowded in July. We’d been watching attraction wait times online for the past few weeks, and knew that three-hour waits weren’t uncommon, and that most Fastpasses would be gone early in the day. We wanted to take advantage of every little time saving trick that we could.
The moment of truth arrived: we inquired about the perks we were hoping for. The main desk clerk referred us to the concierge desk, and the concierge deferred to her supervisor, Sasa. After much runaround, the hotel told us that because we had not booked our hotel stay at the same time as our park tickets, we were not eligible for the extra Fastpass. This is something Disney definitely needs to change, because the only reason we didn’t buy them together was because park tickets were not released early enough. We did book both parts of the deal through Disney’s official site, which I’m sure is the behaviour they are trying to drive. We were incredibly disheartened not only to be faced with one less Fastpass in hand, but also to have to endure rope drop and paper ticket issuing at the main gate, which I’ve heard is a crowd-control nightmare.
Finally Sasa said that what she could do was to refund the park tickets we had purchased (even though they were marked as non refundable) and then allow us to re-purchase them through the hotel, which would get us the package deal. The refund is supposed to take up to a month to process; fingers crossed that it actually comes through sometime.
We were issued our park tickets, and I was disappointed to see that they were all Toy Story themed. I’ve kept a ticket from every Disney park we’ve visited, and they’ve all been blue Mickey Mouse themed tickets. I’m hoping to frame them all one day, and was hoping for consistency. Oh well.
We booked a mid-afternoon Roaring Rapids Fastpass with the concierge now that we were eligible for it. The hotel-arranged Fastpasses are not linked to the regular Fastpasses you book using the Shanghai Disneyland app once you’re in the park, so you can hold one of each concurrently. It didn’t take long for the hotel-arranged Fastpass to show up in our account on the app, which we had set up before leaving home. So that was a good sign that we would be ready to start booking more Fastpasses as soon as we got into the park the following morning.
We felt relatively good after our long flight, so we freshened up a bit in our room, and then walked over to Disneytown for something to eat. The walk took about 10-15 minutes. It was hot out, perhaps 85F, but nothing worse than what we’d left behind at home. We had checked out the Disneytown restaurant directory online ahead of time, and were planning to eat at Food Republic, but this was the first place that culture shock really kicked in for us. The food looked good but also foreign, and we were unsure of where to jump in. And the real kicker was how crowded and chaotic the restaurant was, how we couldn’t read most of the signage, and that there were no free tables anywhere. Frankly, we found it a bit overwhelming. We decided to leave and look elsewhere instead. We settled on Kokio Noodles and Bar which was decidedly quieter, where we split a couple different bowls of noodles.
Before calling it a day, we shopped a bit at World of Disney.
Our key observations were that there were no Christmas ornaments for sale, which I’d pretty much expected, but hoped wouldn’t be true because I like to collect one from every trip. There were also limited trading pins that say Shanghai on them, and there was lots and lots and LOTS of Duffy and friends merchandise. Before walking back to the hotel, we located the hotel guest Disneytown entry gate so that we’d know where to go in the morning. And with that, we called it a night.
(I really didn’t take many photos on our first day, but not to worry – I will more than make up for it in the days to come.)
Cook Family Travels 