Day 4 - Enchanted Garden Breakfast with Diseny

The other perk about staying in the Disneyland Hotel is the special breakfast in their Enchanted Garden Restaurant. The Disney characters will come over to your table, say hello and you can take photos of them!

At the last day, Jayden was not feeling too good already. We figured that it could probably be due to the foggy atmosphere for the past few days that we went up to higher altitudes. He had a slight nose and his cough is getting more frequent. He was also running a slight fever when we put him to sleep the previous night. So our plan was actually to let him have his good sleep while we enjoy our breakfast. We carefully moved him from the bed to the stroller taking care not to wake him up.

 

The food here is not bad at all. It is more like an international breakfast buffet with lots of bread, cereals, waffles together with asian local cusines like pratas, porridge, fried noodles and buns.

With a rather loud and noisy group just beside our table, Jayden was roused from his sleep. Notice that he was not wearing shoes? We really did not want to wake him up so he was also in his PJs.

Sleepy face Jayden! Mickey's friends also come along to take photos with us!

Daisy! 

With Goofy!

And Pluto!

We also went over to the garden just outside of the restaurant to take a photo at this nice heart shaped arch. Too bad we did not have time to walk around the garden a bit to check it out. 

By the way, for Hong Kong Disneyland, you are ok if you did not bring your strollers along. They offer rental for strollers and the strollers are pretty well built and has a big basket below. In all attractions, you will have to park the stroller outside of the place and carry the baby/kid inside. No strollers are allowed anywhere.

And this is a new part of the park that is just opened. The Toy Story Land. It is actually a rather smallish extension to the Disneyland park.

We actually got Jayden on this ride but I will not recommend this to such a young toddler. Although it looks slow from the outside, it is really quite fast, at least what I think for little toddlers. Jayden was not bothered by it though. He was like Mr Bean sitting and looking blankly while the dog goes round and round.

This ride, The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh was next. Again, we can use the Star Pass for this ride and we were up right in front. This ride is quite nice. It is a slow moving ride, basically moving you through different parts of it telling you a story. And the next part of our trip back to Disneyland was quite interesting. It's the photo sessions with all the Disney Characters.

Not sure where our little Jayden learnt this. But he kept sticking out his tongue when we ask him to pose for photos!

And he gives his favorite character a big hug!

We also took a photo of Pinocchio though we are not really fans of it and totally skipped Goofy here and Minnie Mouse. Looking back, I realized we have no Minnie Mouse taken with us at all!

Jayden does his tongue thingy again.

We head on to the small world for a ride there. This is another ride that has no height restrictions and thus, no issue for the little ones. It is a slow ride in showcasing many different dolls for different parts of the world.

I like this castle quite a bit. I was secretly wishing that we could enter the castle premises, but alas, it is just a building that looks nice from the outside and empty on the inside.

So that's it! We are finished with the second day of the Disneyland trip and were back to the airport for our flight back to Singapore.

We certainly had fun in Hong Kong and will not hesitate to recommend anyone with babies to go there! Disneyland is a nice place to go to and even for us, without taking the rides, we took almost two full days to complete the park in a nice, not too rush manner. One day is certainly not enough if you want to enjoy your time there. Our flight back with Jayden was a little more tiring than the flight coming since he was up and not sleeping throughout the entire flight. But it was still quite ok.

Time to plan for the next trip! 

 

This post is part of a series that I did for our Hong Kong Trip in 2012. You may check on all posts related to this trip by clicking on the "Hong Kong Trip 2012" tag. Only minimal photos are posted on the blog. There are much more photos that are posted on our Facebook Page at Daddy NiVleK. Click on here to get to the album. Support us by clicking on the "Like" button now!

 

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Playtime with Daddy @ Playground

It has been some time since I spent time alone with Jayden, let alone playing with him or bringing him out by myself. And so, I decided that while Hazel is cooking for him, it will be a good time and opportunity to bring little Jayden down to check out the playground. I think Jayden is no stranger to playgrounds. We have brought him several times to various playgrounds but he was still not too confident or know how to play the slides. Recently, he discovered by himself that slides are awesomely fun!

We started off with a mild thing first..rocking on the horse (or in this case, dino)..

It was less than 5 minutes and he decided that it is not fun enough. Up the stairs he goes~

And into the tunnel….

Having fun~

And he bravely tries the slide for the first time here...

Wheeeee~ Fun!!!

And rinse, repeat X 10.

Yups, 10 times or more was approximately the number of times he climbed up the stairs, into the tunnels and down the slides. If I did not tell him that we need to go back to have his meal, I think he would have gone another 10 times more. But it was sure a great time with Jayden. Something that I should do more often.

On a sidenote, why do kids have SO MUCH ENERGY!!!

 

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Day 3 - Hong Kong Disneyland Hotel & Fireworks Spectacular

It was a short walk back from the Disneyland exit to the resort bus interchange. But the resort shuttle bus was pretty efficient. In fact, during the opening hours of the Disneyland, it operates on a 10 minutes interval, until 12 midnight. You can even request for a shuttle service bus after 0100hrs where the services stops but I assumed that few will use it and those that are coming back so late will probably be using the taxi since the MTR will also be closed.

The Hong Kong Disneyland hotel is very grand and it should be. It is rated as a 5 star hotel and the services that we received there was just top notch. I am so glad that Hazel upgraded our rooms from the Disney Hollywood hotel (Just nearby) to this. We got the Garden View room but our view was actually more of the main room. That didn't lowered any form of impression I had. I secretly wished that we had chosen the Sea View room instead and that upgrade was not really expensive. 

The room is very nicely decorated and kept clean. We love the fact that the room is huge! And it has KING sized beds! Wooohoooo! Good for us parents that has a little boy who co sleeps with us! The toilet is big and spacious too. I can imagine getting a bed and sleeping inside the bathroom. No problem at all. Our room was a Snow White & Seven Dwarfs themed room. 

Jayden approves the bed!

We were also surprised that they have a store right in the hotel where you can do shopping till 2300hrs everyday. Perfect if you want to do some more shopping after the park closes. Best part? No crowd to squeeze with here and you have a fitting room to try on all the disney themed clothes. Nice!

By 6pm, we were back in the park. Since there isn't much people around this foundation, it was a great time to take a nice photo. I kinda like this shot, too bad the skies wasn't cooperating to be more blue that day.

At 6pm, we were running a little late. We had actually booked and reserved for us to be dinning in Plaza Inn Restaurant for the "Star Fireworks Dinner".

This dinner costs HKD$360 per pax and features a seven course Chinese Cantonese dinner. A little expensive but there is a reason. You get to access the exclusive viewing area reserved for the guests in this package. The viewing around is just right in front of the Sleeping Beauty castle where the fireworks will be displayed. My minor complain was that the information presented in the Disneyland guide was not representative of this. It depicts a photo of a family sitting and sheltered in the comforts of the restaurant and watching the fireworks from the place where they are seated for dinner.

This was the other major highlight of dinning here. Getting to meet up with the Disney characters in a Chinese Costume in the restaurant! Look at happy Jayden is!

At 745pm, similar to the Disney parade, crowds were already gathering and chopping a place to seat down to view the fireworks.

We quickly went towards our reserved area for viewing the fireworks. The guests that are in the Star Fireworks dinner package will be given a wrist band to identify yourselves and the cast member will be allowing you into the area. They were also vigilant to keep any unpaid customers into the area and politely request them to exit the area. 

Just look at the crowd here.

I did not take a lot of photos for the fireworks display. Too lazy to set up my tripod to take a nice shot.

After the fireworks, it was a mad rush for everyone to get out of the park and head back. For us, we scrapped our plans of heading to the Night Market and decided to do some shopping in the shops until most, if not all of the people are out of the parks. 

We were the last few to leave the park. It is nice how Disneyland bothered to light up the place so nicely since the park does not open till very late at night.

Back at the hotel disney shop, we continued shopping there and bought quite a number of stuff. We also got this two cute toy story soft toys. By the way, Jayden is officially a soft toy lover. But interestingly, he is okay to put the soft toy back into the display shelves whenever we ask him to do it. No cries or grumbles.He just puts it back.

And that is it for the day. Good night.

More to come. Stay Tuned! 

This post is part of a series that I did for our Hong Kong Trip in 2012. You may check on all posts related to this trip by clicking on the "Hong Kong Trip 2012" tag. Only minimal photos are posted on the blog. There are much more photos that are posted on our Facebook Page at Daddy NiVleK. Click on here to get to the album. Support us by clicking on the "Like" button now!

 

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Day 3 - Hong Kong Disneyland, here we come!

Day 3 and Day 4 were the days that we had planned to visit Hong Kong Disneyland. We booked a room here in the Hong Kong Disneyland Hotel and were picked up by the tour agent early morning to check into our new hotel. There is a slight issue though. We will not be able to actually check into our rooms and get access to the rooms early in the morning. We will only be able to check in and get the "paperwork" done, leave our luggage at the bell counter and then head on to Disneyland via the resort shuttle bus. The room will be ready after 1500hrs.

During the check in process, I took the opportunity to buy the Star Pass too. It is a tiny little booklet that has fast track access to certain rides or attractions.

The rides that are included in the Star Pass are "Festival of the Lion King", Mickey's Philharmagic, "The Golden Mickeys", The many adventures of Winnie the Pooh, Buzz Lightyear Astro Blasters and Space Mountain. It costs a mere HKD$90 per pax to get this Star Pass and I will elaborate about the usefulness of this later.

We were really excited about going to Disneyland again. And with Jayden's new interest in Mascots, we are certain that he will have fun here despite not being able to enjoy quite a number of rides!

The nice Hong Kong Disneyland Railroad station.There is only two stops for this train. One here just at the main entrance and then all the way inside at the Fantasyland.

This is the only Disneyland park in Asia and if I am not wrong, the smallest of them all. As we went on a off peak season, there was quite some crowd but still not too bad.

We had early lunch for that day and after searching around, we decided on having it here at Tomorrow Land in the Starliner Diner. This was my choice, the Jumbo Hot Dog Combo costing HSD$66. It was quite good and Hazel got the fried chicken set. We bought a kids meal (HKD$52) for Jayden but it was really too hard for his age.

And upon coming out of the place, we met Buzz Lightyear. He became my favorite mascot that we met during the trip. Like what we say, his pattern more than badminton! The guy inside is really quite good at posing and doing funny stuffs in that suit.

The plan that day was to have lunch, catch the "Golden Mickey Show" and then, the "Festival of the Lion King", followed by catching the main parade and then back to the hotel for check in.

One golden rule for theme parks queue. Never be fooled or tricked by the seemingly empty queue at the front. Why? Because, they are usually designed such that the actual entrance area is quite far back! And this is where the Star Pass comes into action.

We presented our Star Pass, the cast members proceeded to tear out the relevant tickets and we were at the "Fast lane" queue. There were less than 10 people in front of us and we are guaranteed to have front row seats as they will only allow the normal queue people to come in after we have went in and settled down. And the theatre was full house! 

As we were seat just at the second row, we had a great unobstructed view of the entire show and Jayden was frankly just glued to what was happening right before him with so many familiar characters appearing life sized! The only gripe I had was that the show was in Cantonese and I could not understand most part of it. But that is ok since most of it just more dance, action than talk! I do strongly recommend everyone to catch this show.

The show lasted for 30 mins and after it ended, we still have some time before heading to catch the next show.

Flipping through the Star Pass, I suggested that we go to the Buzz Light Year Astro Blasters ride. There is no age requirements and height requirements, so Jayden will be able to enter the ride and be part of it.

It is a ride and you get to sit in the spaceship and grab the gun and blast the aliens away. Jayden was with Hazel and as you can see, he is still too short to be able to see. This will be perfect for kids of at least 5 years and above. 

Next, we went to the Festival of the Lion King. We were almost late and missed the Star Pass queue and would have to be squeezing in with the main crowd. Fortunately, we were still able to get a front row seat again.

This show is a little different from the previous Golden Mickey show. The Lion King show is mainly in English and there are just very short sections where Cantonese is being spoken. Overall, quite a good show and I like the way they move the mouth and eyes of the props to make it seem alive! But if you have only time for one show, go for the Golden Mickey one. Time really flies when you are having fun. It is going to be 330pm soon and time for the parade to get started.

The parade starts from the stretch in between tomorrow land and Fantasyland and comes down towards the Main Street, U.S.A. It is about 345pm when it reached the place where we are standing at the Main Street. We only caught the parade the last time we were here in 2007. Looking back at the photos taken previously, Disneyland has since changed some of the "floats" and props which is really refreshing for me to see.

And we left at about 4pm when the parade has finished to check into our rooms.

More to come. Stay tuned!

 

This post is part of a series that I did for our Hong Kong Trip in 2012. You may check on all posts related to this trip by clicking on the "Hong Kong Trip 2012" tag. Only minimal photos are posted on the blog. There are much more photos that are posted on our Facebook Page at Daddy NiVleK. Click on here to get to the album. Support us by clicking on the "Like" button now!

 

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