For the past several months, we haven't done much in the way of travel, either domestically in China or internationally. In fact, ever since coming back from Thailand last Christmas, outside of a few business trips to Beijing, Chengdu, and Wuxi, we haven't left the city of Shanghai at all.
One big contributor to our lack of family travel is the advent of the Season Pass at Shanghai Disneyland! Shanghai Disneyland opened last summer (on Cherry's birthday no less), but until recently, we had not dared to visit, amidst stories of horrible queues and poor behavior from domestic guests. However, when the deals for discounted Season Passes to Shanghai Disney started to appear, we jumped at the opportunity!
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| We're heeere! |
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| Arrr matey! |
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| Lukas loved meeting his heroes |
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| Shanghai Disney has some of the most advanced rides of all the Disney parks! |
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| Truth be told, the Star Wars exhibition area was pretty lame, but sitting in the Millennium Falcon is a dream come true... |
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| The canoe was one of the kids' favorite rides! |
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| Fifi liked the drawing classes |
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| Tomorrowland at night! |
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| Shanghai Disneyland's Fairytale Castle is the largest of all the Disney castles |
At first, we feared that Shanghai Disneyland might be a poor visitor experience. There was a lot of negative press when it first opened nearly a year earlier, with horribly long queues and poor behavior from many of the guests, who were from more remote parts of China.
However, we found that the experience, at least in April, was quite nice. The park was immaculate and queues were quite acceptable, maxing out typically at the 45 minute mark. The ride we went on most over the last few months was the Pirates of the Caribbean ride, which has been completely redesigned and is totally different from the Pirates rides at the other parks. Typically our wait time at Pirates was under 15 minutes! Similarly, using the single rider line at Tron got us on in just 5 minutes!
Some of our other favorite attractions were the Stitch encounter, where visitors got to interact with a digital Stitch in the theater, the Buzz Lightyear shooting game, as well as the Pirates of the Caribbean stunt show, which featured one of those indoor skydiving machines. Shows are a highlight of Shanghai Disneyland, with a good Tarzan show and various shows that took place on the pathways as well.
Some interesting observations - Turkey legs are a huge hit - the line for those things was often longer than the lines for the attractions! The line for the Chinese version of Soaring was almost always ludicrously long after our initial visit - most of the time over three hours! Also, I can't quite figure out how the restaurants stay afloat. Most of the local visitors seemed to bring enough snacks to keep them fed through the day. Early on there were reports of the food being sold in the park being overpriced. While high, I believe it was still lower than Disney food in the US parks, so it didn't seem completely unreasonable, although I will say that the quality of food did seem to be lower.
It was also super convenient for us to get to Shanghai Disneyland. We typically took a cab or got dropped off at the Metro station, and from there it was a mere 15 minutes away from the park. Sure beats driving over an hour to Orlando and parking miles away!
Interestingly, as the season went on, we were never able to have as short queues as we did during our first visit in the spring. We got a weekday pass, which appeared to actually be a mistake. I installed the Shanghai Disneyland app, which tracked queue lengths throughout the day, and it actually seemed like everyone assumed lines would be shorter during the weekdays. In fact, they seemed to definitely be shorter on Saturday and Sunday!
Even so, we got to do every attraction at least once except for the Rocketship ride, and several twice or more. The kids wanted to do the Dwarves Mining Train (the Shanghai Disneyland equivalent of Thunder Mountain) one more time, but I couldn't tolerate the typical 2 hour queue for that ride after our first visit. All in all, a fantastic value as the tickets were just over 900 RMB for adults, and I believe about 600 for Fifi. Lukas was completely free!
