Disney Doll

I've previously wrote about going to be our guest for lunch, well I only went and got to go for dinner and meet beast!!!!

Myself and a few friends from work decided to go to magic kingdom after work one evening, we got there and decided we were hungry and were trying to think of where we should go eat. 

One of us mentioned be our guest, and most of us just laughed and were like "oh yeah were going to get in there, people book that restaurant out 6 months in advance" 

Anyways no harm in trying, so off we went to be our guest where we were faced with a long line of people who were checking in with their already made reservations. 

2 of the girls decided to queue up and ask about the possibility, while me and 2 others stood to the side to avoid the embarrassment of being laughed at for even asking!

Anywaysss......... a few minutes later one of the girls ran over extremely excited saying we had a reservation for 5 minutes time! At this point I still didn't believe her and thought she was having us on. Turns out she wasn't!

The girls got to the front and asked if there was any chance in getting a table for that night, the lady working asked how many of us there were, to which they told her 5. The lady then asked if all of us were present because there was a cancellation available for 5 minutes time!!! 

She then said she was joking but then reassured us that we were very very lucky and there was in fact a reservation! 

So 5 minutes later we walked through the gates to the castle, were met by Lumiere and lead to our table, which turned out to be the exact same one I sat at last time! how strange! 

I went for the salmon on leek mash potatoes, it was so so nice! I would defiantly recommend it to anyone going for dinner. We then went to explore the castle again and whilst in the west wing witnessed a Disney proposal! 

It was so so cute, and being the cast members we are, one of my friends had a Polaroid camera and captured the moment for the couple, so we gave them a few print outs of their engagement!

The best part, finally getting to meet beast! 

He doesn't sign yet, although he is learning! but we got to take lots of pictures with him which ill post below :)! 

At the beginning of October one of the girls i've met here had her 21st birthday :)! 

I got really excited because it hadn't been anyone's birthday for a while and it was a excuse to go buy presents! On the day of we decided we'd go to universal (make use of our annual passes) 

Spent most of the day in Harry Potter world, playing up to being British! it was such a good girls day out :)! we ending up meeting some others at Downtown Disney later in the evening and had celebratory dinner at Paradiso 37. 

If i'm honest the food is nice but its quite pricey for what it is, I just went for an appetizer in the end, the birthday girl had multiple cocktails and enjoyed her night though so all was good :)!

When the pumpkins and decorations got put up in Magic Kingdom at the end of August, I was like really! its August! (example below) I knew Halloween was a big holiday over here, but August really! 2 whole months before, Even people who lived in the same housing complex as me had started decorating their windows with Halloween stickers!  

However it did make it a little more exciting to see it all start changing for the coming season in Magic and once I realised the Halloween parties started from September until October, it made much more sense!

Anyways the dates for the parties got released and it was announced that throughout the majority of September, Cast Members could go to the parties for a discounted price. 

Me and a few others decided to go on September 26th.

It was a lot of fun, I went dressed as maleficent, my roommate was a butterfly, and kept knocking everyone out with her wings! we also had a bacon and egg and Mary Poppins!  We went to the villains dance party, where Cruella pulled me up on not knowing what maleficent's pet bird was called, as I had a bird sat on my shoulder. she told me I couldn't walk around dressed as her with the bird on me, if I didn't know his name. Turns out hes called Diablo, and she didn't let me forget it! (may have just used Google then, sorry Cruella!) but I did remember for the rest of the night at least!

we also met a few different characters that you don't get to usually meet, Captain Jack Sparrow, Terk from Tarzan and Jane; after they had to leave and just left the gorilla by herself. she was really good though, kept trying to eat bacon hahah! and then the seven dwarfs, where bashful kept trying to hide behind the butterfly wings! we tried to meet snow white and aurora but time was going so quickly and it was time for the Fireworks! 

Hallowishes and the celebrate the magic before hand was amazing! its always so well timed to the music, ill try post the videos I got of it. We then went to the start of main street and got a front row seat for the 10:30 parade. That was also amazing but unfortunately the headless horseman couldn't come out because it was raining and he'd slipped earlier in the week :( 

To finish we went and met the boss in his own Halloween costume. He was dressed as a vampire! I love meeting Mickey, hes always soo cute! When we left the meet and greet the heavens had opened! It has been drizzling all night but now it was like a monsoon. we decided to stick it out though and went on the hunt for candy before the party finished! we done the trail through adventure land and hit the jackpot over by splash mountain where they basically filled our bags up for us!

We had time for one ride so we ran for big thunder mountain, were we all got our own carriage because of how quiet it was by this point. Overall it was a really good night and i'm glad I went! 

Here is a few pictures of the night below. 

Be Our Guest is one of the restaurants I really wanted to go to whilst here at Disney. Unfortunately getting a dinner reservation is hard so we went for Lunch for Harriett's 20th Birthday :).  

It is so pretty inside, the ball room is amazing! theres 3 different dining rooms that you can be seated, and we were sat next to the ball room. From the windows in the main ball room you can see snow falling outside, its little touches like this that make taking you away from the real world so easy. You actually forget its really scorching sunshine outside of the walls around you. 

Before I came to Florida, I said I was going to make a point of going down to Miami and a few weeks ago the party bus who put on nights out for CPs done a day trip to Miami, it was only $40 so i thought why not! Although I was working till 1am, didn't get home till 2, and the bus picked us up at 4:30! so I had almost no sleep that day! 

we got to Miami for around 9am and headed straight for the beach! It was the first time i'd been to a beach since coming to Florida and it was Lush! the weather was so nice, until it started to rain for like half an hour. that wasn't so bad though. I really wanted to go to DASH while i was there and it got to about 4pm and we finally went! i was so excited! It was surreal, it was so like how it is on the Kardashians. I actually recognised one of the women who worked there from the kourtney and khloe take Miami episodes. 

I bought myself a little Dash compact mirror as a souvenir and then we went to TGIs for tea before heading home. It was such a good day, I cant wait to go back for a full weekend! 

Whilst in Florida I want to make the most of my time and experience everything I can. I've always wanted to go to Universal, mainly for the Harry Potter World, and we found out we could get a residency form from housing that allowed us to get an annual pass for universal! it was $202 but a 1 day ticket for both parks was $135 and I've now been 4 times so its definitely worth it. 

The first time I went a big group of us went for one of the Atish's 20th birthday; one of the English lads out here with us. I don't think I've ever been more excited than when we first entered Harry Potter and I had my first frozen butter beer, Id recommend the frozen over the original! 

When I first found out I was working in a Disney resort instead of one of the parks I was a bit disappointed, but now i'm really happy that I was placed here. DAAR is one of Disney's newest resorts so its very busy, and a lot of people just pop by to take a look.

In Merchandise you interact with a lot of guests every single day, but being at a resort, you get to know the guests, as you'll most likely see them every day for a week or so. some of them remember you by name and come by to say hello and its really nice when guests do go out of their way to come and find you to speak to you, to tell you about what they've done that day, or if they enjoyed something you recommend to them. 

The first few weeks, ill be honest, were not too great. Getting to know the store and what we sold took time so it was a bit annoying when guests would ask if we sold something and I genuinely would not know and constantly had to go ask someone else. I also got given a lot of morning shifts and this is when most of the local residents who are slightly older than myself worked, so i felt I didn't have many people to talk to and work wasn't that much fun. Being British didn't help so much with this either, Its amazing how different our cultures are. 

Then it all changed and I got later shifts and met the majority of the other college program. I was lucky in one way that someone else from England who I met in Florida was also based at this resort, so I already had one person there I knew. All of the CPs were really nice and made working more fun and enjoyable. Although shortly after I arrived, a set of CPs were leaving, so we lost some people around a month after I started. 

Now though I have made some of the best friends at work. Its always a better day when I know i'm going to work and some of the people i'm closest to are working the same hours as me. 

It does make me sad to leave them behind for when I move over to my next role, but ill make sure to pop back over to art to keep in touch! 

Heres some of my work family below <3

There are usually 3 main tiers of training but as I am an International CP, I get 4. ( a little extra time to get used to the currency)

Tier One started on July 22nd, this was just us getting taken round the resort again, looking for fire extinguishers and AED machines. (Safety begins with me) we done a fun little scavenger hunt to get to know the resort better, although it was very hot and rain was on its way, so it was a quick hunt! 

Tier two, took us back to Disney University. On the morning we done our alcohol and tobacco exams to make sure we could sell them. I was surprised I could, not being 21! but no turns out you can sell it at 18, just cant drink it till 21! even more annoying ha. Then we had lunch and the second part was register training. We were placed in a room with a few registers, to learn the basics. As id worked in retail before and have experience with them, they partnered me up with another person so I could help them get to grips with it. 

Tier Three! back to the resort, this day I got to work for real at a register, although I wasn't impressed with the 5:30 am start. There were a few things i'd forgotten how to do, like applying discounts, and travelers checks, who still uses travelers checks really?! but it was straight forward enough. It was the money I struggled with, american coins are so confusing! The 10c is smaller than the 5c, how does that even make sense! so they had to stick on what was what on the drawer for me. i'm completely fine with it now though! only having 4 coins does make life easy after a while. 

HOH- during my training I had an extra day of heart of house. This is learning how to stock. It basically goes over how you identify an item to put it away or find one if you need it, and how you scan items into the store. Easy now but at the time my head was boggled. 

Final Day of Training, Tier 4. Exam day! basically at the end of training you have to sit an exam and get a pass rate of I think 85% or more to qualify. I was a bit nervous but you have your trainer with you to guide you along. Ended up getting a 94%. I PASSED and was now a qualified merchandise employee. 

So i'm actually about 2 weeks away from finishing my merchandise section of this program and I haven't even wrote about my training yet! Time passes by so quickly here.

This is going to be long so I apologise in advance. 

After traditions, we had a meeting to go to where we found out our work locations. Mine was Disney's Art of Animation Resort (DAAR) in the Ink and Paint shop. Here we were given the start of our training schedules. 

On the 20th of July, 5 days after arrival, training started with a welcome to operations class. This was at the Disney University, the morning was a basics class of learning the Disney Point.(using 2 fingers or your full hand) believe me, after a while you loose the ability to point with one finger! we also had to learn the Disney scoop, of picking litter up, and learn about our green, yellow and red zones for lifting items. Pretty boring but its a must. 

The afternoon we all split off into our sections, so I went to my welcome to merchandise class. here they told us more about merchandise and what we could expect from it. we heard stories from people who had worked in merchandise and what they had been able to do from that. It got you excited to go in to that section of the business. 

The second day we went to our cast services building for our movies, memory's and magic class. Although I read my information wrong and ended up going straight to my resort, so I was around 5 minutes late! It could have been worse though. This is where we were given our earning my ears tags. They then took us on a tour of the resort and some of the hotel suits. This class basically went over the foundation of Disney as a company and about how we all help make magic for the guests. 

Finally after this we were given our costumes ready for starting at location the next day! Mine actually isn't one of the worst, pictures below. 

So disney traditions was quite an early start we got picked up from vista at 6am to get to disney university for 8!

Traditions class was the first of our formal wear and the first time I had to cover my tattoo up! A challenge at that time when I was barley awake! I also ended up getting the makeup all over my dress by the end of the day :/

If you ever come and work for Disney you’ll here a lot about the 4 keys and this is basically what traditions is about, SAFETY, COURTESY, SHOW and EFFICIENCY

It’s gets tiring! It is hard to stay awake after that early start but you get through it and they show you videos of what making magic can be like, it was quite a tear jerker for some people!

It gets more exciting as the day goes on, you get to go on a tour through the tunnels in magic kingdom! And walk through certain sections whilst they tell you the significance of if all :)

Then the best part! WE RECEIVED OUR NAME BADGES FROM MICKEY!! Along with our cast member cards, meaning we could finally go have fun in the parks! And also a surprise present from disney for graduating traditions. All these will be pictured separately

So I got my Visa through the day before I left for Florida! that was a stressful day. Anyways I arrived in Florida on the 15th of July and got placed in Vista Way. At first I wasn't too pleased as it does have a bad reputation but now its okay. I also got put in a room with a girl I know from home, so that was a bonus. Vista also has the bus depot and we're a lot closer to shops and restaurants here as well compared to the other 3 complexes so it has its perks :)! 

There was around 8/9 of us on the flight coming over and some of us hadn't booked the mears transport shuttle, but it turned out cheaper for us to just get a taxi from the airport than what it would have done if we'd paid for the shuttle. 

once we got to vista we got our housing passes and our schedules for the first week.

The first night i literally just shot all my stuff in my apartment and got on a bus to Walmart to go and buy the necessary pillows etc. Walmart was another adventure in itself! but everything Disney started from the following day. 

On the 16th and 17th we had welcome meetings at the commons clubhouse. The first was just an introduction, reminding us of housing rules and getting any questions we had answered. The second one was for us to fill out our social security paperwork for those who needed a number. Its boring but doesn't take up too much time! 

On the 16th of April Disney sent a email through reminding us to take a look through the Disney look guidelines and make sure that we would be able to meet them before we arrive in Florida. The only things I need to change is possibly to take out my tragus piercing, they say your allowed one set of earrings and these are the standard bottom of your ear lobe. As I don't really wear my normal earrings on a day to day basis, i'm unsure whether ill be allowed to keep my tragus in or not but i guess we'll see. 

I also have a small tattoo on my wrist which i will need to cover. I've been looking around to see what the best make up would be to cover it and i'm struggling a little bit with that one! not long left though so i'm going to have to order something!

Finally my hair!! I had my ends dyed blonde and it just will not go away. I really don't want to put a dark dark dye on my head with going to live somewhere so sunny, so i'm just going to dye it again the night before I go and hopefully it will look more natural!

The other reminder was from the on boarding website shown below. 

This was nice to get just to keep the excitement up a bit and keep us reminded that there is still lots of little bits to get done.

The paper work for the hire documentations wasn't bad. It took some time to read through but then you only need to sign and date them. whether this was in English or US format I wasn't sure!