Day 3 [part 8]: More and more wandering! Feat. Winnie the Pooh gift shop, Star Wars Launch Bay
After leaving the maze, we walked by a snack stand called “Merlin’s Magic Recipe,” and I got SUPER exited!!! On the menu, they had these super cute buns shaped in Mickey and Minnie!
I walked up to order the Mickey Pork Bun, and had my heart broken as they proceeded to tell me they were sold out. They had the Minnie bun… but that one’s not pork it’s red bean. I wasn’t really in the mood for something not a pork bun… and I was kind of feeling the Magician Pork Puff… but I wanted the Mickey shaped bun. SO, sadly, I walked away with nothing but the though of a Mickey Pork Bun in the back of my mind.
But I guess that was alright… because shortly after the snack stand we were in the Winnie the Pooh area. (Winnie is one of my FAVOURITE characters, and everyone in the party knew this as well haha.) We weren’t planning on riding Hunny Pot Spin, which is basically like the tea cups but you’re in hunny pots haha. BUT THE SURPRISE was that WINNIE THE POOH WAS MEETING AND THERE WAS NO LINE UP. Needless to say… a certain someone was extremely excited!!!!
Brian snapped this photo of me running up to Winnie
(Oops, poor Jenna got caught in the frame)
Couldn’t be a happier girl
I wonder if Winnie thinks I’m as cute and loveable as I think he is!
I was in a good mood again and managed to sort of forget about the Mickey Pork Buns. We decided to see if they had any cute Winnie the Pooh merchandise in the store! We were not disappointed!
I think the American parks/stores have this one, but I can’t help it. SO CUTE
WINKING WINNIE THERMOS!!!
Random Thumper march, but SO DARNED CUTE
Teeniest, but cutest little coin pouch
Then, we found out that Shanghai
Disneyland sells a park “passport” and there are machines all throughout the entire park that will stamp it for you. Each page in your passport will take you to a different land, and when you are in that land, you flip to the land specific page and you put it into the machine and it will emboss stamp a unique image into your passport! So neat and such a cute souvenir to have!
LOOK HOW CUTE THE STAMP IS!!!
Yes, Brian decided to get the Chinese version of the passport instead of the English one because he thought it was a better souvenir! After, we decided it was probably a better idea to get the English just so we could actually read the info on each page. But that’s okay, a Chinese passport just shows that it was definitely from Shanghai! We also made it a mission to make sure we got all the pages stamped (and noticed that there was one for the Alice in Wonderland maze!!! And it’s located at the very end at the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party! Just means for SURE we’d have to go back!)
After consulting a map to see what we wanted to do next, we decided to head back to Tomorrowland to see the Star Wars Launch Bay, and do some character meet and greets!
On our way, we ran into the Snuggly Duckling from Tangled. Except they didn’t call it the Snuggly Duckling!
“Tangled Tree Tavern”
It’s another quick service restaurant
Decor is pretty cute!
We didn’t want to have a full meal at the moment, so we just walked in to take a look and then continued on to Tomorrowland!
We got some caramel popcorn!
And here we are!!! Star Wars Launch Bay!!!
Location in the park, it’s kind of tucked away. It’s at the very very end of Tomorrowland, and if you were super excited and ran straight to Tron, you wouldn’t even know they had a Star Wars Launch Bay! Basically there’s a walkway to the left before you enter the beautiful land of Tron haha. I mean, if you look at the photo, it doesn’t look that noticeable unless you knew it was there. Which ended up being kind of a good thing for us, since it meant basically an empty launch bay =O!!
Poe’s X-Wing
BB-8!!!
Another view of Poe’s X-Wing
Millennium Falcon Cockpit
We thought it was interesting that the meet and greets listed for Launch Bay included both Darth Vader AND Kylo Ren. Time lines … not a thing here I guess haha. They also had R2-D2, C-3PO, and BB-8 listed as a meet and greet!! I was really excited to see a full sized moving BB-8! And we were curious to see how our meet and greets with Kylo Ren would be like in Shanghai. Glendon and I had both a very good encounter with Kylo in Florida, as well as a nothing-to-write-home-about encounter with Kylo in Florida. Oh Kylo… He's a bit of an awkward character, so that's probably why we had such vastly different meets before.
Mandarin Kylo was just as awkward!
And Darth Vader was very Darth Vader! Just in Mandarin haha
Both of these meet and greets were pretty similar. Except Darth Vader was more straight forward, your typical Darth Vader experience (just in Chinese.) And the Kylo meet... probably would have been pretty interested but it was also in Mandarin, and Kylo kind of went into a bit of a mandarin monologue!! It was kind of funny to us though haha.
Now onto R2-D2 and C-3PO! A little bit disappointed that R2-D2 didn’t move, but I guess for a safety standpoint that kind of makes sense…
But they let you touch him!
Awkward posing with C-3PO photo hahaha
We couldn’t figure out where on earth they had the BB-8 meet and greet, and we looked everywhere! (Launch Bay isn't actually all that large, so we should have found him!) We just couldn’t seem to figure out which room had the meet and greet with BB-8. But then we took a closer look at the BB-8 figure we saw in the middle of the room when we walked in and he had a sign next to him just like the signs for the other meet and greets. NOOOOOOOO!!! It wasn’t a real meet and greet… it’s just a stationary BB-8. We were soooo sad. But I guess… that’s okay… because he’s pretty cute still. (But still kind of really disappointing haha. I would have loved to have watched a BB-8 rolling around, even if you can't get close to it)
A closer look at BB-8, then.
Then we went and took silly photos in the Millennium Falcon cockpit!
After we finished up taking more photos, we decided to head down and take a closer look at Mickey Avenue!
Next... Mickey Avenue!