DCP Day #2: Housing and Resort Adventures

Yesterday (Thursday) was a pretty easy-going day. We didn't have anything until a mandatory housing meeting at 2 pm so I slept in and it was quite lovely.

The housing meeting was at The Commons--which used to be an apartment complex solely for international participants in the program, but they've now opened it up so anyone can live there. We walked over from Patterson and it was maybe a 15 minute walk or so.

It was a pretty straight-forward meeting: don't kill anyone, don't burn your apartment down, don't do drugs, no drinking under 21, no means no, be respectful to security officers, that type of thing. Pretty redundant but it's Disney so they made it fun: the room had a fog machine and flashing lights and loud remixed Disney songs being played when we first got there. They made it less tedious, which was well-appreciated.

Coming out of the meeting, it was pouring rain. My roommates and I took a bus straight out to Walmart to go grocery shopping. Gazillions of groceries later, we piled back onto the bus and headed home. We basically got home, put our food away, and immediately ate dinner before turning back around to go resort hopping.

I'm scheduled to work merchandise at Disney's Pop Century Resort. My roommate Jackie is scheduled to be a lifeguard at Disney's Animal Kingdom Lodge as well as Disney's Coronado Springs Resort. The two of us have never been to Disney World before and since we don't have our passes to go into the parks, we thought it'd be nice to at least go poke our heads around to see where we would be working. Each resort was on a different bus route so our logic was that whichever of the three buses came around first, that was the resort we would go to first. The G Bus came through first so we were going to Pop Century! :)

Jackie, myself, and our roommate Megan had the bus to ourselves. We headed out to Walt Disney World (shrieking when we drove under the Disney World sign) and were very enthusiastic about going resort hopping. But...we got off on the wrong stop.

Welcome to my next 4 months!

Long story short: we got off at the employee entrance to the Pop Century resort and while we felt confident in our ability to find the guest entrance to Pop Century...we wandered around for an hour and tried to use Siri to help us. The pinnacle of the evening was when we went bushwacking up a hill through the trees to at least try to see what was over the hill. I accidentally kicked a fallen log and Jackie and Megan freakeddd out because we had just been talking about alligators and they thought it was an alligator at their feet.

Thankfully the college program bus comes around once an hour, so when it came back around we dejectedly hopped on. We laughed pretty dang hard when we realized the bus drove less than a minute and the next stop was the main entrance to Pop Century--what we had spent an hour trying to find. We got off and spent the next few hours looking around the resort.

Prince Eric <3

Pop Century is decades based: each wing of the hotel is based off a different decade. The resort spans the 1950's all the way to the 1990's. In each wing are large statues to commemorate either a pop cultural item popular during that time period (a Rubix Cube, bowling pin, large tub of Play-Doh, etc) or a Disney character whose movie came out during that time period (Mowgli and Baloo, Lady and the Tramp, Roger Rabbit, etc). The lobby has shadow boxes full of pop cultural icons for each decade (My Little Ponies for the 90's, a He-Man action figure for the 80's, etc).

We went into the main lobby to see the shop where I would be working. The store opens right up to a large food court that serves breakfast, lunch, and dinner. I don't know if I'll be working selling the food as well or just the merchandise, but I at least have some idea of where I'll be! The store is a pretty standard Disney store.

A bridge across a lake connects Pop Century Resort to it's sister resort Art of Animation so we walked across to check that out next.

Early draft of Timon...

Art of Animation is one of the newest resorts (according to my roommate Megan) and it's wings are based off of different animated Disney movies: Cars, Finding Nemo, The Lion King, and The Little Mermaid. Each wing has different statues with iconic characters from those movies so we naturally posed with them as well.

Art of Animation was set-up very similarly to Pop Century: a food court and souvenir shop all connected. I absolutely adored their lobby: the walls were lined with different character sketches of characters from the highlighted movies. You could walk along the wall and see different versions of how Timon was drawn before they settled on the final design. It was pretty neat to see. I was geeking out over the Lion King sketches.

We caught the bus from Pop Century and headed home where we basically all passed out. Today is a free day: nothing is scheduled. I think we might head back to Walmart for some returns and then go check out where Jackie is working today.