IHSAN KHAIRIR

Our last day was spent in Universal Studios Florida. Since we got to have whole day here we decided to not rush things and just enjoy the moment.

Woody Woodpecker. I remember enjoying Woody Woodpecker cartoons when I was little. I think he’s like Bugs Bunny. All he does is just annoy people around him and still he comes out on top at the end of each episode. And I loved it. Especially his ‘taunt’ or laugh, I can’t quite represent them in typed words.

Anyway, I guess nowadays you can’t create a cartoon character for kids with a name like that. Woody Woodpecker. Hah.

Lining up for the Shrek 4D show. I love the promotional posters that spoofs real-life movies. Like Pinnochio being the star of Liar Liar. 

 
The Mummy ride was awesome. We waited in line for like 45 minutes for this one, but it was worth it. The pyrotechs in there, you can really feel the heat on your skin. If the waiting wasn’t so long you can be sure I’d go for a second ride.

That ‘Pharaoh’ on stilts… he was in character the whole time. Never smiled at all, even when a bunch of girls tried to tease him. One girl got so scared she ran… and the ‘Pharaoh’ chased after her… into one of the shops. It was so funny… her friends was laughing the whole time. I wonder if she’d find it funny. I wonder if she was actually genuinely terrified. 

 
The MIB ride, we decided to take the Single rider line, which only cost us 2 minutes of waiting. This is the smarter way to do it I think. You might not get to ride the same car as your friends, but you exit the ride about the same time and you get to share the same experience anyways, so what’s the difference? It’s not like you’re going to be talking to them in the car, you’d be too busy trying to shoot all the aliens around you.

I got to be on the ‘disabled’ car and since there were no disabled person on the ride, the seat next to mine was empty. Every rider gets his/her own gun, but I got to dual-wield 2 guns, which was awesome, made me feel like a badass ambidextrous super-agent. I was shooting different targets in different directions the whole time, which was totally exhilirating. I got around 100 as my score, another 2 riders in my car got about 150 each, but a young 8-yr old girl got only 9 points, so it brought down our average greatly. It was fun though, coz the group we were up against have 6 people in their car (we had only 4) and they got only a below 90 average. So we were declared winners. 
    
The Back to the Future ride has no Single rider line, so we waited in line for about 30 minutes I think. I especially like this one because we got to ride in a ‘DeLorean’ and the screen was so big it was actually a whole sphere-shaped theatre screen (I dunno what to call em). I know that this ride has been there for quite a while, so the ‘movie’ wasn’t in high def so it felt less real than I hoped it was, but still I enjoyed the experience enough to come out of it satisfied. Most of my friends say that the ride made them a bit dizzy but not me, I was pumped up and high after that one.

    

After that we just walked around being silly and take pictures… a lot of em.

   
    
I especially like this one… where I got to pretend to pry open the jaws of the shark called Jaws. That thing was huge, I think hanging by its tails it was about 25-30 feet tall. Maybe even more. I’m not really good at feet and yards. I’d say it was like 10 meters perhaps.

I think it was safe to say that we took one picture every 45 seconds of walking…

Then we headed to the Hard Rock Cafe Orlando, said to be largest Hard Rock Cafe in the world.

Next to Hard Rock Cafe was an NBA store, so I went there and got myself this….

I am in no way comparable to Billups… but I do like to play the way he plays.

  
A couple of pictures before we left for the day…

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The next morning we left Orlando for Ann Arbor after 5 days and 5 parks – Animal Kingdom, Magic Kingdom, Epcot, Disney MGM and Universal Studios. I wish we’d stayed a little longer so we’d get to get on more rides in each park, but we knew that time wasn’t a luxury anyone had, and you had to choose the ones you really want and not regret not taking the ones you didn’t so that you’d enjoy the day more. Which I think was the smart thing to do.

Ah, it was fun. 

We only spent a couple of hours in Epcot, because we planned to return to Magic Kingdom again later in the day…

One thing I regret… I didn’t buy any EPCOT souvenirs… darn. I wanted a replica that durian-like sphere on my desk because I know that it would possibly be quite a couple of years (decades?) before I would get a chance to come to this place again…

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Durian, the king of tropical fruits… I love em!

Picture of the durian is taken from invisibleelephant.net

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Next: back to Magic Kingdom

Orlando Day 3 – Disney MGM Studios

We began the next day by visiting Disney MGM Studios (now known as Disney Hollywood Studios), the movie/film industry themed portion of Walt Disney World.

Everyone felt so uppity that day that we took almost 10 pictures every 3 minutes… we barely walked 5 steps and all of us just stopped to take pictures…

We took pictures with anything that catches the eye… even just a car on the side of the road…

MGM Studios has sets for filming scenes in certain cities… for example San Francisco (the pic above)…

… and the classic New York City. Personally I think the NYC set looks more convincing, what do you think?

The ride of the day… The Twilight Zone Tower of Terror in the Hollywood Tower Hotel… the ride drops you down and shoots you up multiple times and you can see the view outside as well… got us pumped with adrenaline. Good thing we got on this ride before lunch.

Car stunt show was both fun and educational… and they try to slip in some comedic appeal as well, which, for the easily amused me, worked excellently. The show featured some car stunts and also some ‘how we did it’, with a cameo by the famous Volkswagon Herbie (the Love Bug) and a big explosion to end the show.

As with previous Disney parks… go to the Disney store, wear fancy hats, take pictures, put them back. Pick another hat, take pictures, put em back. Rinse and repeat. Haha we’re so cheap! We’re the real Mad Hatters of Disney!

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Next stop: EPCOT                  

The first of our 2-day Park Hopper quest… Disney’s Animal Kingdom. We took the 9am shuttle from our hotel near Downtown Disney and arrived at Animal Kingdom about 20 minutes after.

Park Hopper is one of the Disney Park packages offered that allows you to go to any of the Disney Parks in Orlando (Magic Kingdom, Disney MGM, Animal Kingdom) for unlimited number of times within the span of 48 hours. It is much cheaper than buying day passes at each park, especially if you plan to go to more than one Disney Park in a day.

It wasn’t even 10 am yet and Animal Kingdom was full of people. Unless you’ve waited at the gates since before the park was opened early in the morning, you would always see hundreds of people around — tourists, families, field trip groups, and of course the park staff.

A picture before entering the park. There were 3 signboards for Animal Kingdom… one with an elephant’s head, one with a dragon’s head, and other one I can’t remember (someone help me on this, please). We chose the elephant’s head. No particular reason though. Maybe because it was the middle one.

      
We saw the enormous Tree of Life from afar. One look and one might think it’s a real tree, but in fact it’s man-made. Inside the tree is a theatre where we got to see a Bug’s Life 3D presentation, which was definitely a lot of fun.

The Tree of Life’s bark is full of animal motifs… we can spot a few obvious ones from afar, but for some they are so small or hidden you really have to search.

A cute set of statues of Huey, Dewey and Louie with Daisy hiking along a small  stream. It looked like Daisy was really waving at us.

A must-do for anyone visiting a Disney park… photo sessions with the main Disney characters. We lined up for about 15-20 minutes to meet and greet Mickey and Donald. One of my friends remarked that all of us seemed too old to be doing this, but everybody does it anyways regardless of age, so we waited in line, being the only bunch of twenty-somethings without a kid in the group taking pictures with Mickey and Donald. I didn’t think it was childish at all. Someone’s that insecure, I guess. Anyway I had fun shaking hands with them, Donald even tried scanning the barcode on one of my friend’s t-shirt, which I found amusingly hilarious.

Then we went to a Lion King’s musical theatre presentation… which was awesome. Being the only Disney fan in the group, I was the only one among my friends who was able to sing along to the all the Disney songs they sang in the musical, even though my singing voice some would prefer not to hear at all. A lot of singing, a lot of dancing, awesome choreography. One performance I found most entertaining was a group of acrobatic ‘monkeys’— they were really good at doing flips and jumps and balancing acts, it seemed more like a themed circus show to me at times. Definitely an entertaining presentation I must say, the performers have really done an awesome job, no doubt.

    
Then there was the African safari ride, the Everest ride that we didn’t have time to go to, and the dinosaur show that we didn’t see. All because of time constraint and the weather, which seemed like it was about to rain, and it did, for a couple of minutes, which caused a lot of the outdoor rides to be closed, but then afterwards the sky cleared. I feel bad for the people who lined up for 90 minutes for the Everest ride only to find out that it was closed because of the lightning, thunder and rain. I was glad that I abandoned my waiting in line for Everest, otherwise it would’ve been a waste of one hour of my time.

        
 
The sky cleared in time for the 4 pm parade. The main ‘streets’ were closed, thousands of people lined up the sides of the streets to watch the colorful parade. We were fortunate enough to find a good spot to sit and watch without having to stand for hours.

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After the parade, we left Animal Kingdom via shuttle to our next destination – Disney’s Magic Kingdom.

This is a repost with minor edits of my vacation to Orlando, Florida with my Malaysian college-mates. We went for the trip in the summer of 2006, while I was still an undergraduate at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

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Orlando Day 1 – Seaworld

We arrived in Orlando from Detroit at about 10 am, rented a car, checked in at a hotel, and out to Seaworld that very morning. The weather was really hot and humid, which kinda reminded me of Malaysia… that first day I think I sweat gallons. By the time we went home my shirt was almost entirely soaked.

Took a picture right after the entrance gates. On the ‘lighthouse’ at the back – there’s a drawing of Shamu – the bigshot celebrity orca at Seaworld.

Shamu is really BIG. That killer whale didn’t look as huge while swimming around in the water and tossing the trainers around. Once it ‘whaled’ itself onto the stage right in front of us we could see how big this mammal is compared to us humans.

I expected to be soaked by Shamu’s tail splashing but we were seated too far back to be splashed on by the orca. The audience who sat on the first 4 or 5 rows were soaked. I wouldn’t mind the soaking; it was just too hot, I’d love it if a whale would splash cold water to cool me down.

Shamu was everywhere… and almost every time we see the whale’s representation (sculpture, statue, mural, etc etc) we would stop and take a picture. I guess it wouldn’t be Seaworld without Shamu.

A shark was flying around in a dark room… nah. This was taken while we waited in line to see some sharks in an aquarium. That shark on the wall is of course fake.

We ended the day petting some dolphins. Earlier we petted some stingrays… they are cold, soft and slimy to the touch. These friendly and cute dolphins however, are hard and smooth to the touch, reminded me of a shiny motorcycle gas tank or helmet.

We did a lot more than just watching Shamu and petting dolphins, but I just want to make these entries short and simple, so tell me if you want to know more (which I’m sure nobody does).

Next day, our next destination – Animal Kingdom.

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I have been browsing my old Xanga entries and stumbled upon the Orlando posts, which brought back a lot of memories. Seeing that I used to have zero readership back then (and some small amount today) I decided to reshare the experience again here with the fairly recent readers.

Has anyone else here been to Seaworld Orlando? If you have, please do share your experiences as well, it’d be fun to recount and relive the moments =)

I shall repost Day 2 of the Orlando trip in the next post.