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.
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| Welcome to my next 4 months! |
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.
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| Prince Eric <3 |
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.
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| Early draft of Timon... |
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.
