homeward bound
i got back from florida yesterday (technically today at midnight.) it was a long day of travel, a flight from florida to minnesota, and then to seattle, and seattle to anchorage, each flight was about 3 hours and some. all in all it was a successful vacation! of course there's always going to be some downsides to every vacation. alec and i are planning on going back to disneyworld in september and we're going to do a lot more research before then. i think last may we got lucky that it wasn't as busy because they were still doing park reservations but, no more of that. the park was so busy because last weekend was presidents day weekend and also lots of sports teams are going there because they're in florida for championships (dance, cheer, etc). definitely did not research that. last year and this year we kind of just winged it at disneyworld but the next trip i'm going to have to plan more. you have to literally make a list of things that you need to do every day if you're going to have a completely fulfilling trip, i think. disneyworld is just that popular that even the "slow" months there are busy now. we still enjoyed it a lot though. luckily the first few days were not so busy, and then it was raining on the weekend so in the later evenings everyone kind of cleared out so we were able to do some more things without waiting forever. if you go to disneyworld there is always two things that are true no matter what: you will wait ( a lot! ) and you will spend a lot of money. that's just how it is. but! it will also feel very magical! there is no other place in the world that is like disneyworld. i have six-seven months to plan another trip and i don't strictly just want to go to disneyworld... it's an unpopular opinion to alec but i do want to experience other places while i have the chance, but on the other hand i also want to get my own apartment too. i feel conflicted. traveling does take up so much time, thought, and money, and when i think about traveling outside the country i have no idea which place to choose. also, traveling takes a lot of courage as well i think. a while ago my coworker did a whole european trip where he went to a lot of countries. i just don't know where i would choose to go though. i like to combine trips when i'm in the lower 48s because it's cheaper and closer to fly from a state other than alaska, but if we went to florida and then did a trip to europe we would be gone a long time, so i think we would have to split it up into two trips. i'm not a big fan of big touristy cities though. we met a lady in florida named maribel who moved there from spain in 2000 and she said when she went back recently, to barcelona, it was very different than how it was before. she said there was a lot of thievery and other crimes going on. her purse got stolen on the bus. she said when she went back to her hometown which is a smaller town it was a lot nicer than barcelona. alec's cousin's girlfriend taeryn has been to paris and she said the best part were the museums there. of course i can't knock a place i've never been and there are many wonderful, great things about the big cities and, you know, they're famous for a reson. i think over every place - i know it's cliche - i would go to london. my coworker went to malta by herself a few years ago and then she started dating my other coworker and she convinced him to move to the us virgin islands with her for six months. i can't even imagine. i'm not normally jealous of people but regarding things like that i think i am! one of the reasons i don't want to have children; i would lose having the choice to do things like that. i like having the option to do it even if i don't necessarily plan to do anything like that.
a cool thing that happened was that on valentine's day the characters were doing meet-ups as couples which basically never happens. unfortunately we didn't know until later on that day but we were able to get beast and belle's signatures and photos which was nice! it's really hard to meet beast in a meet n greet apparently. we had to wait a little bit over an hour in line which i wasn't happy with, alec really wanted to do it but i didn't (i'm not a big fan on meeting characters but i'm slowly getting used to it...) after a while we started getting along again about it (lol), also what helped is that i started a conversation with the lady in line next to us (maribel) and she was really nice and we chatted about her dog who was in a stroller- her dog is named amore- which helped pass the time. if i had known the couples don't usually come out together to do that i would have been way more congenial about it, you know? also it would have been cool to see the others but unfortunately it was too late in the day by then. for me, i don't care about meeting the characters as much because i think there's always another chance to see them. but yeah, with the couples, not so much, so i do understand why alec was so keen on that. we also met jasmine and aladdin together :) it's always a little bit awkward meeting the actors playing the characters because they almost don't seem real! like belle will look at me and she seems almost too perfect, her make up and everything, and they're completely in character. i heard disney is really strict on the casting for the characters. the beauty and the beast show - live on stage was awesome, alec and i watched it twice. we watched fantasmic! three times. the third time was on sunday night and it was so busy that we had to go to the ampitheater an hour and a half early, but we got really good seats, like the fourth row of bleachers from the stage in the middle. i like being closer rather than farther away because you can really see everything, and sometimes even people's faces distinctly. when you're closer the lights are so bright though, and the sudden flashes of fire and fireworks. alec tried to drink around the world but he only made it to morocco. he got through japan, china, america, germany, norway, italy, france. we skipped africa. we had to down the limoncello in france, we're not a big fan of wine. the red sangria in morocco was the best, they make it themselves. also the lamb kebabs are really good as well.
the biggest mistake we made (i made): thinking that i can do 16 hour days at disneyworld, 7 days straight... next time, i'm taking a break every three days or something. on friday night i got sick and i was throwing up in the morning. alec was convinced we ate bad ice cream but i feel like it might have been the combination of that and also walking in the rain all day and just overall worn out from the long days. the food at disneyworld is not great and we felt like it definitely messed with our stomachs.