Yay home!

[ru]

It's so bizarre to look back and realize that only twelve hours ago, you were several states away. I am definitely BEAT, thanks to a combination of getting up too early and having to sit in a car for several hours, essentially just sitting around and cross stitching, intermittently being interrupted by a bouncing, impatient dachshund.

Lessee...how to chronicle the last couple of days...well, we went to Disney, and did the Magic Kingdom and Epcot. There was newness at both places, which we started seeing shortly after getting out of the car. Firstly, the monorail, which in my experience has been prompt and frequent in its circuits, was SLOW AS HELL. We suspected it had something to do with the fact that for Floridian kids, school had started, so they were slackening the monorail schedule, but whatever it was, the monorails were slow to arrive and get going, and were held up due to traffic on the tracks. After spending quite a long time trying to get to the Magic Kingdom, we discovered that Disney employed some sort of new added thing you have to do before getting into the parks. Beforehand, in order to get into the park, after going through security you had to pop your ticket into a card reader, go through the turnstile, and get your newly spat-out ticket on the other side before going on into the park. Pretty easy, pretty quick and painless, with only the occasional card that needed babying from the attendant.

However now, in order to get your ticket back after inserting it into the card reader, you have to stick your fingers into some sort of weird box thing and let it do SOMETHING to you before it would spit out your ticket and allow you into the park. Aside from the fact that this weird reading thing really slowed the entry lines down(since no one knew how exactly the finger box wanted your fingers, so the attendants were kept pretty busy), it was downright bizarre. Um. What was that finger box thing doing? Taking DNA samples or something? We asked one of the attendants there, and she said it was "measuring your knuckles". ...okay. Why would our knuckles need to be read? The answer we seemed to get was that it was being used to attach our ticket to our person. Okay, but why? In case we lose our card? Granted, that would be a good way to verify we are who we say we are, but somehow that seems like a weak excuse. As you can imagine, we were conspiracy theorizing all over the place. Were they tracking what sorts of people went to Disney? Were they having security issues? OH I KNOW. THEY WERE TAKING SAMPLES OF US AND STORING IT SO THEY COULD MAKE CLONES OF US!!!!!111

Well, I dunno. In any case, it was peculiar.

Over the course of our two-day stay, we got exposed to two new rides. "Stitch's Great Escape" was the replacement ride for "The Extraterrorestrial Alien Encounter" they had way back when. I remember that ride was definitely intense. Maybe a little too intense for me, considering when we left the ride I had my mom's hand in a death grip, but the rest of my family seemed to enjoy it. It sounds like Disney got complaints about it being too intense and scary and was freaking out the kids, so they had to tone it down a bit. Or a lot, in this case. Granted, seeing a Stitch-centric ride made me smile, and it was definitely cute, but I think it was toned down too much. It had become kid's ride with a moment of scariness in the form of darkness, and I think it was too mild. Oh well. It was still cute.

"Soarin'", however, was AWESOME. Probably one of the best simulator rides I've been on. The image of gliding over California in a hang glider contraption, feeling the wind and smelling pine as you go over redwood forests and orange as you go over orange groves was pretty neat and realistic and was just WOW. My only complaint tho, was that they could have made the cuts between places a little smoother. It was just one minute you were flying over a redwood forest, cut, now Napa Valley. They could've done a fade out thing or something to help negate the fact that you're in a simulator rather than the real thing. Oh, I know what they could've done. The ride started out with you flying through the clouds. Why couldn't they just, when they wanted to change scenes, give the illusion that you're flying back up into the air, or getting obscured by clouds, or something, and then showing the next scene when the clouds part? I dunno. Other than that though, I really really liked it.

On a different topic, last night was our last night at my aunt's house(obviously, seeing as I'm now home). So we spent the time chatting and whatnot, and somehow got onto the subject of my uncle's family. A while back, his mother put together an old album of pictures for him and sent them to him, so we got to all pore over his family album. It was pretty awesome seeing what his life and family are/were like. Furthermore, since we had expressed curiousity over it, he also brought out the wedding kimono his mother and aunts wore when they got married. Yes, he's Japanese. My god, it's GORGEOUS. It's this beautiful red and black color, with incredible embroidery that included gold and silver cranes and orange mums. It also came with an orange obi that had a similar-but-not-quite-the-same pattern on it.

As my mom and I were going O_O at its awesomeness, he offered to let me try it on. As you can imagine, I was a bit worried about that, considering that this was an important family heirloom, and I'd be terrified that I'd hurt it in some manner, but he seemed to indicate that it was okay for me to do. So, I got to try on the wedding kimono itself with a separate, white and red kimono underneath that seemed to be analogous to a slip. We didn't put the obi on though, since he had no experience with obi tying, but just the kimono itself was enough. I was inwardly squeeing the entire time. Let alone the fact that not everyone gets a chance to do that, but the fact that he was trusting me with it left me in quite a bit of awe. I definitely got a thrill out of wearing it. However, I'm glad I only had it on for a few minutes, long enough for my dad to document the event with his camera. It's definitely WARM. I found myself trying to imagine his mother wearing it for however long the wedding took, and figured she must have been pretty hot by the end of it.

So that was the end to my vacation in Florida, essentially, as it was late at night and we had to go to bed. I definitely enjoyed myself. At the same time tho, I'm glad to be home. I was missing people and things. ^_^;