Welcome to the world of tomorrow!
Mar. 14th, 2008 10:04 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
vovatOnce again, bethje's comments are in green.
On Tuesday, we made our first visit to EPCOT. (That is supposed to be spelled out in capital letters, right? It is, after all, an acronym, but I sometimes see it spelled out with lower-case letters. Also, no one seems to use the "Center" part of the name anymore.) It's easy to spend a lot of time there, as it has both the Future World and World Showcase sections. I'm not sure that the rides there have the same re-riding value as the ones at the Magic Kingdom, but if you mostly want to look at things, EPCOT is probably your best bet. We didn't get the chance to go Soarin', although I would have liked to. We did ride Test Track (if I could drive, the first part of Test Track would probably traumatize me, particularly the part about breaks locking up) and Spaceship Earth, though, the latter of which is really new. It includes animatronic recreations of historical scenes, and there's also an interactive part where the computer sticks pictures of the riders' heads onto drawn bodies. It provides a vision of the future that seems more like something they would have thought up in the fifties than anything I would expect to actually happen but I love retro-futuristic, but I guess that really fits the whole theme of EPCOT (and Tomorrowland, for that matter). I wore my Futurama shirt there (because of the future theme, see?), and one of the Spaceship Earth attendants said he liked it, and asked where it was from. (It was from Hot Topic, by the way.) We also went on Ellen's Energy Adventure, hosted by Ellen DeGeneris and Bill Nye. I'm sure the fundamentalists love that ride, since it features a lesbian AND talks about the Big Bang. {g} I also noticed how Bill Nye played it safe with the global warming part saying only that there are a lot of questions about it. I guess it wasn't Al Gore's Energy Adventure, after all. I did think it was pretty funny, the parts that were supposed to be, that is. And Alex Trebek was in it and everything. We also went on Mission Space. We went on the orange part, which is supposed to be more aggressive. I don't know how the green part is. I like how everyone got to play a role. Nathan was the navigator and I was the pilot.
The pavilions for different countries are pretty neat, and I should be getting some pictures up sometime soon. I do think it's weird how some of them have films and/or rides, while others only have shops and
restaurants. It's a little imbalanced, if you ask me. I wish they each had a ride and a film. Oh, well. Also, it's kind of odd that there are no countries from Eastern Europe or the Southern Hemisphere. You'd think they would at least include Russia and Australia. Maybe they're planning on adding in some more in the future, assuming there's any more room. The Norway pavilion featured a boat ride with trolls, and a bakery where Beth bought an almond-covered and frosted pretzel, and I got some school bread, which is a pastry with coconut icing on top and stuffed with vanilla custard. It was really good, but a little too much. Oddly, it cost exactly the same amount on the meal plan (one snack) to get that school bread as to get some cherry ice at Tomorrowland on Monday. After watching The American Adventure (a film accompanied by robots of Benjamin Franklin, Mark Twain, and others), we had dinner in Italy. I had the penne pasta and I had cannelloni and a chocolatey dessert (but I had a chocolatey dessert everywhere I ate), and I actually thought it was better than what I'd had the day before at the California Grill, yet it only cost one meal for each of us. I didn't really care for the fresh mozzarella appetizer, though, since it was cold like fresh mozzarella always is. As it was, we managed to see all but three countries (France, the United Kingdom, and Canada) on Tuesday, so we came back on Friday to finish up. We never did get to see the film on China, though. Unfortunately, we missed the fireworks, because we were at dinner that night.
Stuff about each country (remember, I like looking at stuff in stores):
Mexico: I liked all of the pretty painted animals for sale in Mexico. They also had margaritas for sale, but I never got one. We went on the little boat ride, which featured the Three Caballeros.
Norway: I loved the little pastry shop. The store was full of things with crazy trolls on them. The boat ride for Norway was very different in tone from the one in Mexico. Mexico was about music and parties and bright colors, but Norway was all about adventure and potential danger. The movie had a similar tone.
(here's where I forget the order of the countries)
Germany: I knew they had beer in Germany. I thought I might get one, when we got there, but I ended up not. The toy store was full of those Playmobil toys and some other toys that I had seen at Target one Christmas.
China: I lament not seeing the movie, and I wanted to buy all of the pretty teacups in the store.
Italy: We got our photopass and got a picture of ourselves taken in front of a fountain. We also had dinner there, as written above.
Morocco: I loved Morocco possibly the most, for the sounds and architecture and everything. I'm kind of sad that we didn;t eat there. No couscous for me. And I don't know what kind of plant or whatever is in Morocco, but it smelled like the best thing I've ever smelled.
Japan: The store was full of fun/cute things and lots of pretty little bags with flowered patterns, maneki nekos, and I was surprised that there were some Mario Kart toys by the register.
The little American part. I liked the show, but we didn't really look around that one too much.
Is that all of 'em? Not counting the three we didn't see that day. EPCOT, I think I will miss you the most.
bethje's comments are in green. On Tuesday, we made our first visit to EPCOT. (That is supposed to be spelled out in capital letters, right? It is, after all, an acronym, but I sometimes see it spelled out with lower-case letters. Also, no one seems to use the "Center" part of the name anymore.) It's easy to spend a lot of time there, as it has both the Future World and World Showcase sections. I'm not sure that the rides there have the same re-riding value as the ones at the Magic Kingdom, but if you mostly want to look at things, EPCOT is probably your best bet. We didn't get the chance to go Soarin', although I would have liked to. We did ride Test Track (if I could drive, the first part of Test Track would probably traumatize me, particularly the part about breaks locking up) and Spaceship Earth, though, the latter of which is really new. It includes animatronic recreations of historical scenes, and there's also an interactive part where the computer sticks pictures of the riders' heads onto drawn bodies. It provides a vision of the future that seems more like something they would have thought up in the fifties than anything I would expect to actually happen but I love retro-futuristic, but I guess that really fits the whole theme of EPCOT (and Tomorrowland, for that matter). I wore my Futurama shirt there (because of the future theme, see?), and one of the Spaceship Earth attendants said he liked it, and asked where it was from. (It was from Hot Topic, by the way.) We also went on Ellen's Energy Adventure, hosted by Ellen DeGeneris and Bill Nye. I'm sure the fundamentalists love that ride, since it features a lesbian AND talks about the Big Bang. {g} I also noticed how Bill Nye played it safe with the global warming part saying only that there are a lot of questions about it. I guess it wasn't Al Gore's Energy Adventure, after all. I did think it was pretty funny, the parts that were supposed to be, that is. And Alex Trebek was in it and everything. We also went on Mission Space. We went on the orange part, which is supposed to be more aggressive. I don't know how the green part is. I like how everyone got to play a role. Nathan was the navigator and I was the pilot.
The pavilions for different countries are pretty neat, and I should be getting some pictures up sometime soon. I do think it's weird how some of them have films and/or rides, while others only have shops and
restaurants. It's a little imbalanced, if you ask me. I wish they each had a ride and a film. Oh, well. Also, it's kind of odd that there are no countries from Eastern Europe or the Southern Hemisphere. You'd think they would at least include Russia and Australia. Maybe they're planning on adding in some more in the future, assuming there's any more room. The Norway pavilion featured a boat ride with trolls, and a bakery where Beth bought an almond-covered and frosted pretzel, and I got some school bread, which is a pastry with coconut icing on top and stuffed with vanilla custard. It was really good, but a little too much. Oddly, it cost exactly the same amount on the meal plan (one snack) to get that school bread as to get some cherry ice at Tomorrowland on Monday. After watching The American Adventure (a film accompanied by robots of Benjamin Franklin, Mark Twain, and others), we had dinner in Italy. I had the penne pasta and I had cannelloni and a chocolatey dessert (but I had a chocolatey dessert everywhere I ate), and I actually thought it was better than what I'd had the day before at the California Grill, yet it only cost one meal for each of us. I didn't really care for the fresh mozzarella appetizer, though, since it was cold like fresh mozzarella always is. As it was, we managed to see all but three countries (France, the United Kingdom, and Canada) on Tuesday, so we came back on Friday to finish up. We never did get to see the film on China, though. Unfortunately, we missed the fireworks, because we were at dinner that night.
Stuff about each country (remember, I like looking at stuff in stores):
Mexico: I liked all of the pretty painted animals for sale in Mexico. They also had margaritas for sale, but I never got one. We went on the little boat ride, which featured the Three Caballeros.
Norway: I loved the little pastry shop. The store was full of things with crazy trolls on them. The boat ride for Norway was very different in tone from the one in Mexico. Mexico was about music and parties and bright colors, but Norway was all about adventure and potential danger. The movie had a similar tone.
(here's where I forget the order of the countries)
Germany: I knew they had beer in Germany. I thought I might get one, when we got there, but I ended up not. The toy store was full of those Playmobil toys and some other toys that I had seen at Target one Christmas.
China: I lament not seeing the movie, and I wanted to buy all of the pretty teacups in the store.
Italy: We got our photopass and got a picture of ourselves taken in front of a fountain. We also had dinner there, as written above.
Morocco: I loved Morocco possibly the most, for the sounds and architecture and everything. I'm kind of sad that we didn;t eat there. No couscous for me. And I don't know what kind of plant or whatever is in Morocco, but it smelled like the best thing I've ever smelled.
Japan: The store was full of fun/cute things and lots of pretty little bags with flowered patterns, maneki nekos, and I was surprised that there were some Mario Kart toys by the register.
The little American part. I liked the show, but we didn't really look around that one too much.
Is that all of 'em? Not counting the three we didn't see that day. EPCOT, I think I will miss you the most.
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no subject
Date: 2008-03-15 03:30 pm (UTC)We DID have dinner in Morocco that first trip there (when I was 8), but I have no idea what the cuisine was like because I was horribly sick that day* and couldn't eat ANYTHING without throwing up. Though on a subsequent trip to EPCOT I did have an almond cookie in Morocco that was very good.
*Which makes you wonder further how EPCOT turned out to be my favorite section.
no subject
Date: 2008-03-18 10:41 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-03-15 07:43 pm (UTC)Lol, "Ellen's Energy Adventure"? Those godless communists at Disney...:P (I'd wondered what Bill Nye was up to these days...)
no subject
Date: 2008-03-18 10:43 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-03-17 02:50 pm (UTC)Wow, I thought this feature never got installed. I thought they halted production on it after Ellen came out all those years ago.
no subject
Date: 2008-03-18 10:45 am (UTC)God, I love talking about Disney theme parks.
Date: 2008-03-18 04:54 am (UTC)The company officially spells it in lower-case now, but when it was originally created by Walt Disney, it stood for Experimental Prototype Community Of Tomorrow; and that's what he wanted it to be - a working community. After Disney died, though, the company decided it didn't want the hassle of running a city, and decided to build it as just a theme park, albeit more educational than most. I think they finally abandoned the acronym altogether at some point in the early nineties.
I also noticed how Bill Nye played it safe with the global warming part
To be fair, the attraction hasn't been changed or updated since it opened in 1996, so it's definitely behind the times where issues like global warming are concerned.
Maybe they're planning on adding in some more in the future
There have been various plans over the years to build more pavilions, but they almost always fall through; sometimes because of sponsorship issues, sometimes because the political climate of a proposed country becomes a bit too controversial. I know for sure that Israel was planned at one point, as was Russia. In fact, there have been rumors that Russia might make its way in there yet.
And so ends today's edition of "Heather needs to shut the hell up about Disney theme parks already". Hooray!
Re: God, I love talking about Disney theme parks.
Date: 2008-03-18 10:52 am (UTC)That seems to have been a time of dropping acronyms (well, maybe not dropping them altogether, but acknowledging them less often), although I don't think it was that common to do away with the capital letters as well.
To be fair, the attraction hasn't been changed or updated since it opened in 1996, so it's definitely behind the times where issues like global warming are concerned.
True, although I think a lot of the science was in by that point. It's just that many people chose to ignore it.
As
We still have write-ups on two more parks to come, plus Friday's repeat visit to the Magic Kingdom and Epcot. If Beth ever finishes adding in her comments, that is. {g}