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On Monday morning Nigel & I woke up with big BIG smiles on our faces, for that day we headed to Disneyland :D No matter how old I get I will always love this place. It turns me into a big kid & reminds me of all the good, simple things in life that make me smile. Like candy, & great songs, & just having fun! Hehe Nigel has never been to Disneyland before & was beside himself with excitement on the train. We passed the time by exploring all the cool features on my new Panasonic Lumix camera, which Nigel picked up for me on his way over through duty free. Having found that the quality of the photos my Olympus camera was taking was really not that great compared to Esther's camera I decided to finally upgrade (yes, Mum, you were right about that one!! :P).
When we arrived we made our way through the Disney village with our eyes as wide as saucers looking at all the shops & cool themed restaurants & just the general awesomeness of it all. Our hotel is called Newport Bay hotel & it's inside the Disney village, which means we get to enter the park at 8:00AM each day, 2 hours early than the rest of the public, which is a big bonus! It looks out over a lovely lake & is nautical themed, so everything is blue, white, & red, and there are lots of parts of ships incorporated into everything. We got ourselves all check in at the front desk, & the man was so excited that we had come all the way from Australia that insisted we get a particularly nice room, so he booked us into an extra big room in the corner of the hotel that has it's own door out onto the outdoors courtyard.
We dropped off our luggage & spent the rest of the day wandering around the village, amusing ourselves in shops trying on funny ears, buying & eat Disney-themed candy & just generally acting like big kids :) We had lunch at a 50s style dinner called Annette's where Nigel jokingly declared that it was just perfect but that if the waitress didn't come to serve us in roller skates that he'd be walking out. Actually, she did. He was very impressed! Hehe We shared an old fashioned milkshake & looked through the songs on the jukebox on our table - sadly it was no longer actually functional, but a nice touch nonetheless :) When the time came for us to check into our room we ran & jumped on our two queen sized beds before heading down to the pool for a swim. We checked out the sauna, steam room, & spa, went for a quick dip in the pool, then headed back to the room to get ready for dinner.
Before dinner we stopped by another hotel, which is themed like New York (complete with a Rockerfeller ice/rollerskating rink out the front), for a cocktail at the New York City bar. It's decorated like an old NYC bar from the 1940s or 50s & plays cool jazz & lounge music. Nigel had a "Nice to Meet You" & I had a "Wall Street", & because this is Disneyland, they came garnished with lollies! Mmm…that's my kinda cocktail! :) We had decided on the Rainforest Café for dinner. It's a really cool place that's completely decorated so it feels like you're inside a jungle & the whole ceiling & all the walls are covered in vines & have snakes & monkeys hanging off them. There's the constant sound of rain & chimps chattering, & every now and then a volcano eruption will go off in the corner of the room…very cool! We shared a rainbow colada there (kinda like a pina colada, only it also had some strawberry syrup & banana in it…yum!) as well as a Cobb salad & an Asian-style tasting plate (with chicken skewers, spring rolls, prawn tempura etc.). Because this is Disneyland, an American franchise, you can safely bet on the meals being about 3 times the size of a normal restaurant meal, & that they were. Though we only technically shared a starter & a salad, we could barely get through it all. They may be slightly pricier than your average meal in Paris, but they sure are good value for money - & mighty tasty too!
By the time we went to bed I was feeling pretty unwell…the brief back story to this is that before I went away I was getting really run down & kept contracting viruses, had a whole lot of blood tests etc. run but the doctors couldn't work out what was wrong with me & basically concluded something elusive like "chronic fatigue syndrome" which they pretty much hoped would clear up & go away once I was traveling & de-stressed. Well, I'm certainly very de-stressed now, but since I left Perth I've pretty much had at least one viral infection a week that's lasted a couple of days or so, & seem to constantly teeter on the edge of getting sick. Neither of us slept much on the Monday night because I was up for hours with a fever & coughing & we decided it would be best to push our plans back a day if possible so that we could make the most of our time in the park. Fortunately our entry tickets were OK to be used on any 2 days during the week, we able to extend our stay at the hotel here & cancel one night at the hostel back in Paris, and we were able to move our Mouline Rouge booking from the Thursday night to the Friday - phew!
So we spent most of Tuesday just sleeping, watching movies, & relaxing, trying to get me 100% healthy again for total quality Disneylanding the next day. The people at the hotel even offered us complimentary breakfast on the Thursday morning inside the park at one of the special breakfasts near the Disney castle! So hey, although it sucks to be sick, if there were anywhere in the world I had to spend an extra day resting up I think this would be it :)
We managed to make it out for lunch at a medieval themed restaurant, where we shared this random sort of toasted bread thing that was on very thin lavash kind of bread that was about a metre long & was served on this really long, giant wooden ruler. It had three different kinds (3 cheese, pesto & tomato, & something with ham…) & one again is intended as a starter although it well & truly satisfied us to share as a main meal! By the end of lunch I was half way dead so Nigel pretty much dragged me back to our hotel room & I slept for most of the afternoon. Then in the evening we went to a Chicago style steak house, where we were earlier enough to get the early bird special! ;) hehe Yes, I know, a little sad, but hey, it saved us some money & it was really yummy! We shared a 3 course meal with Caesar salad for starter, ravioli in a white truffle sauce for main, & apple pie with Ben & Jerry's caramel fudge icecream for desert. Yum yum! Then it was lights out by 8:00PM as I willed my body to get better by the morning!
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Ma x I know I was right, honey. I know! ;P