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Fantastic FOLK

Two weeks ago something very significant happened in the lives of every WDW CP and PI. FOLK returned to DAK.

If the acronyms seem a bit bothersome or arrogantly clandestine to you, welcome to the club. Working at Disney has introduced me to more acronyms than I can possibly list... Which is why there's a special website for new hires to reference that does just that. I still don't know what most of them stand for around here; but cast members use the acronyms enough that I doubt most people know or care what they actually stand for.

Anyway, FOLK - Festival of the Lion King - has been down since I arrived in January because its theater has been destroyed and moved to a new location in order to make room for the up-and-coming Avatar Land in Disney's Animal Kingdom. It's a thirty-minute show that includes singers, dancers, gymnasts, and fire dancers, and it pretty much just celebrates the fantastic music from the movie. It's also Jongui's favorite show at Walt Disney World, and he'd been dying to take Rug and I since we'd never seen it before. Go figure he was the only one of our motley crew absent from the show when we saw it two weeks ago!

We went to the show in the early afternoon on Sunday, but Jongui couldn't meet up with us like we'd planned. Apparently he'd agreed to see it with some of his Imagineering buddies later in the day (he transferred from D&E to WDI for the summer portion of his internship and now has a new circle of friends), and didn't want to bail on them. The kid needs to sort out his priorities on which friends he bails on!

Despite Jongui's absence, the show was fantastic. It had great music, as we expected, and certainly lived up to Disney's incredible entertainment standards. Afterward we went over to Expedition Everest for a couple of rides, caught the It's Tough to be a Bug show, and finished off with Dinosaur.

That afternoon, Rug caught me drooling over a Facebook advertisement for Coldstone and decided it sounded good to him too, so the three of us drove out to the nearest one after we finished at DAK. I'd been craving it all week, and it really hit the spot. First, though, we grabbed dinner at Chipotle, where Rug taught me that if you order a bowl instead of a burrito and then ask for some free tortillas on the side, you get more food than just a typical burrito - but for the same price. That, of course, was just what I needed. A bit more grease and salt before I went and stuffed my face full of sugar and saturated dairy fat. It was worth the unhealthiness though, especially because the ice cream I ordered (Cake Batter Batter Batter) was dedicated to Hannah, whose love of unbaked desserts surpasses even that of my own!

We finished the evening with a showing of Maleficent at Downtown Disney. Quite a good movie, if you haven't seen it yet. A great spin on the typical hero-villain archetype that pervades most Disneyfied fairytales. Great music, too.

No More PT

There I go with the acronyms again. It just saves so much time not having to type out "physical therapy," ya know?

But yes, I am done with physical therapy for my knees, which have both, if you haven't read my blog consistently enough to know, been plagued by patellar tendinitis:  inflammation of the tendon that connects my knee cap (patella) to my shin (tibia). I'd spent the past seven weeks going to PT twice a week, and it helped substantially. My right knee still isn't completely better, but the doctor and therapists agreed that I could take it from here on my own now. Just gotta keep stretching it and doing exercises consistently.

It was actually a bit bittersweet during my last session of PT. The two therapists that work with me there are really fun people, and I'd legitimately enjoyed spending an hour chatting with them every Tuesday and Thursday evening. They told lots of great stories of past patients; they also furtively included stories of patients coming to visit them with cookies, months or even years after their therapy had ended.

Actually, before they told me the stories, I'd already planned on surprising them with cookies later in the summer before I left Orlando! Guess it won't be quite as surprising as I'd intended, but it should still be kinda fun. Besides, I have a lot of baking flour left from making my birthday cake back in January that I need to use up before I leave.

Hannah and Mrs. Pottscotts Pay a Visit

As fun as FOLK was, and as satisfying as completing PT was, the true highlight of the past two weeks was last weekend when Hannah and her mom came for a long weekend at Disney World. It had been a record-setting 45 days since I'd last seen Hannah, so it was a particularly joyful weekend with the both of them here.

They arrived Friday evening at two different times. Mrs. Pottscotts lived up to her family's legendary knack for getting bumped and received a good chunk of change for agreeing to switch flights last minute and arrive two hours later. It worked out well for Hannah and I too, though, because it gave us the chance to head to McDonalds for what has apparently become our traditional welcome dinner when she comes to visit. Just like back in February, the first thing we did when she got here was head to Mickey-D's right down the street.

Day 1

On Saturday, we started the day at Magic Kingdom. Our intent was to get there right as the park opened so we could get to the new Seven Dwarfs Mine Train ride before the line grew too large, but despite the fact that we got to the ride just fifteen minutes after park-open, the wait was already 90 minutes long. We didn't feel like waiting quite that long, so instead we went and did Buzz Lightyear, two runs of Space Mountain, and Monsters Inc. Laugh Floor in just over an hour. Certainly an efficient start to our day!

We made our way through Fantasyland and off to Frontier Land by early afternoon, doing everything from Enchanted Tales with Belle and Philharmagic to Splash and Big Thunder. Much to the enjoyment of Mrs. Pottscotts, we also stopped for some Pineapple Dole Whip in Adventureland. According to her Facebook post, that "made her day." Apparently being with her daughter and daughter's boyfriend - who provided free access to the parks all weekend, I might add - at the Happiest Place on Earth hadn't already made her day. But hey. I'm not bitter or anything.

It was too rainy for the Festival of Fantasy parade, so after we finished the Dole Whip we took the monorail out to Epcot for a couple more attractions. We went straight to Soarin', and after that, we did this really neat boat ride that took us through an enormous greenhouse full of vegetables and herbs that were planted and grown using innovative solutions to sustainability. It was another one of those "discovered new magic at Disney" moments. Very cool.

We finished the day at Downtown Disney with a Cirque du Soleil show:  La Nouba. It was absolutely incredible! Very funny, very intriguing, and ludicrously impressive. I don't know how those people discover their strange talents, but I hope they're paid well for showcasing them. Some of those talents are also quite dangerous.

Day 2

We spent the entire next day at Hollywood Studios, covering every attraction we wanted to get to except for an animation class. We did Tower of Terror I think three times, Rockin' Rollercoaster once, and Toy Story Midway Mania twice, along with several shows and the Backlot Tour.

Hannah's brother Leggstirdy was kind enough to send us a link to some of the secrets for the Toy Story ride, and Hannah and I made good use of them. As you may recall, I vowed to reach 300,000 points on the ride before the end of my internship, though before last weekend, my current high was a mere 194k. With the help of Leggstirdy's links and Hannah's teamwork, both of us broke 200k that day, and I even got up to about 228k. Tough to say whether I'll break that score before my internship ends, though, as Hannah's help was definitely the key to my success that day.

Wait, what am I saying? That's the wrong attitude. Back to the gym for wrist curls!

The day at Studios ended with a delicious dinner at Mama Melrose's Ristorante Italiano. We had to trudge through sheets of rain to get there, but it was well worth it! Oh yeah, did I mention that it was a particularly rainy weekend? Well, it was. It was the type of weekend that would have typical Arizonans dancing on cloud nine outside while rain poured and thunder roared. Yes, we do that. Rainy days are days to celebrate in the Valley of the Sun. In Florida, though, it's just another typical summer afternoon.

Thankfully on Friday night we made a trip to Walmart to buy some cheap, matching Disney shirts as well as 87-cent ponchos, so we were well prepared for all the rain. Mrs. Pottscotts in particular got her money's worth, as she dawned her poncho as soon as the first drop of a light drizzle hit her skin. She also wore it on Splash, which is basically the ultimate Disney sin... But I won't judge.

Day 3

On our last day together, Mrs. Pottscotts was kind enough to let Hannah and I spend the entire day together. We decided to spend the afternoon at New Smyrna Beach.

Thankfully this was the one day of the weekend it didn't rain. Instead, it was a warm, sunny day at the surprisingly uncrowded beach. And the water temperature was perfect! We spent all afternoon there, relaxing in the sand and playing in the ocean. We even made a sandcastle, though you certainly wouldn't have recognized it as such. Let's just say it was a very post-modern piece, the appreciation of which required a very good understanding of abstract art. I only wish I had my phone on me for a picture!

We didn't walk away from our fun afternoon unscathed, however. In stark contrast to the two previous rainy days, this one left us with awful sunburns on our back and shoulders. We were only out there for about three hours, and we applied sunscreen twice, so I was quite surprised at the severity of our burns. We used two different types of sunscreen:  Coppertone on our faces and Banana Boat everywhere else. Seeing as our faces were pretty much fine, I'm gonna have to blame the the brand on this one. And the same thing had happened to me and Rug a couple weeks before when we were at the water parks!

Still, it was a wonderful day together. We ended the evening with dinner at Kona Cafe inside Disney's Polynesian Resort, then made a trip to the Contemporary to buy a couple bracelets Mrs. Pottscotts had found earlier that day when she explored the deluxe resorts on the monorail loop. She wanted me to use my 20% discount, which I was of course more than happy to do. And while we were there, we picked her up a Mickey-shaped macaroon!

Seeya Real Soon!

Disney likes to use that phrase when their guests leave the parks and resorts; you'll even find it on a large sign on World Drive near the outskirts of Disney property. Thankfully, this time it also applies to saying goodbye to Hannah. Though it was still a difficult goodbye, as it always is, it was mitigated by our knowledge that we'd see each other again in just a couple weeks. I'm flying home for Fourth of July weekend to celebrate my mom's birthday, and I couldn't be more excited to visit Arizona for the first time in almost four months!

Francisco's Birthday

Thankfully fun times with fellow interns would offset a bit of the sadness in saying goodbye to Hannah and her mom. As luck would have it, the very next day was Francisco's twenty-none-of-your-business-th birthday! We celebrated by getting a dozen of his closest intern friends together for an evening at the Magic Kingdom.

Though Francisco was the birthday boy, it was a pretty magical evening for all of us. He had bought a bunch of party-wear at Party City over the weekend, so we all put on Mickey-themed party hats and paraded around the park with a giant "Happy Birthday" banner. Our first stop was Space Mountain, where we encountered a custodial cast member who greeted Francisco with a jovial "Happy birthday!" - as all cast members do for guests' birthdays - and then proceeded to guess his age in hilarious fashion.

He went through this extravagant act of pretending his broom was capable of guessing guests' ages by asking them three questions. (Since Francisco didn't speak Broom, the broom spoke into the cast member's ear, who then translated the questions to Francisco.) The questions were:  (1) What TV show did you watch as soon as you got home from school as a little kid? (2) What is your favorite Lady Gaga song? and (3) ... Well I forgot the third question, but it was equally irrelevant as the first two. Seems like a pretty silly gag, but the crazy thing is, he got it right! He guessed - er, the broom guessed - Francisco's age correctly, and we still have no idea how he did it! And to top it all off, the cast member's name was Walt. How perfect is that?

After riding Space Mountain and going to Philharmagic, we trooped over to Splash, where we dressed up with glow sticks, fake mustaches, and even more party hats to prepare to take an epic Splash Mountain picture. Perry got a mustache too, as you can see. Unfortunately, right as we finished getting ready, the ride went down! Not knowing whether it would come back up again any time soon, we went instead to Storybook Circus to meet Francisco's favorite Disney character:  Donald.

As it turned out, the seemingly un-magical problem of Splash shutting down was most fortuitous. That meeting with Donald was probably the best character greeting I'd ever witnessed. I can't really explain what it was about him, but he was just hilariously energetic and over-the-top. He even had Francisco put his fake mustache on the tip of his bill for the pictures. Then, as we were leaving, a manager and a few other cast members offered to sing Happy Birthday backwards to Francisco! Of course we stopped to see if they could. And they did. They jumped up in the air and spun around 180 degrees, one at a time, and then sang Happy Birthday.

Even after over five months here, Disney never ceases to impress me with magical moments. It was a ton of fun, and a perfect way to end the evening even though we didn't get a picture on Splash. In fact, don't tell Francisco, but we've got something planned at Studios for later this week to make up for the lack of the Splash picture! Think epic Splash Mountain picture plus twice as many people plus 13 stories in the air. You guessed it:  Tower of Terror!

... This had better not be the one week he decides to read my blog.