duggett wrote:If I can go to just one of the international parks, which one should it be?
We are thinking of taking an international trip, and it would be great to add our first visit to one of the non-US Disney parks as part of the trip.
We have been to Disney World and Disneyland dozens of times and are looking for a new perspective. And we have been to many international locations, but never to one the Disney parks outside the US.
Any suggestions?
Having been to DLP and TDR, if I were to pick my favourite from the two, I'd pick TDR. Tokyo DisneySea alone makes it the best of all the resorts I've visited.
DLP is certainly the prettiest of the Disneyland-style parks. It has the prettiest castle, and it's also the largest of the Disneyland-style parks out of all of them. DLP has the best Space Mountain and the best Big Thunder Mountain of all the resorts, and also has the awesome Disney Dreams nighttime show, which IMO is better than what MK has with Wishes.
WDSP isn't overly amazing, however it is slowly getting better. They're opening a new Ratatouille attraction there in 2014 which from what I've read about it should be pretty good. The park also has some unique attractions that you won't find in other resorts (Crush's Coaster, Cinemagique, Animagique, Ratatouille (when it opens next year).
For DLP, you'll probably want to take two days to get around it all at a nice pace. WDSP you can do in less than a day - it's quite a small park.
TDR is just amazing. TDL is somewhat reminiscent of MK (mainly because bits of it were taken from the same blueprints), but the biggest difference is that *everything* works. No matter how much I tried, I couldn't spot anything in the park that didn't work. Every animatronic works, every effect works. The Cast Members are the most friendly I've ever encountered in any of the resorts. Tokyo DisneySea is by far the best theme park in the world. The level of detail in that park is simply astonishing.
For TDR, you really need two days for each park if you want to make sure you can get through everything. You could get away with one day in each park, but if you want to properly take everything in, two days is probably better. You'll also want to avoid weekends. The crowds in the Tokyo parks goes way up at the weekends.
Hong Kong I've not been to, however I have read up on it (I nearly went there "on the way" to Tokyo earlier this year, but didn't). It's the smallest of the resorts, and only has one park. The new expansion lands have opened this year, so there's some new and unique to HKDL attractions there that look pretty good. That said, it's probably still not really worth a trip just to visit the park. If you're visiting Hong Kong in general, it's probably worth taking a day to go over there, but if you're going on a trip primarily to visit the Disney park, go to Tokyo.
As for the language barrier, don't let it worry you at all. You'll generally find that most cast members in the non-US resorts can speak enough English to at least get the gist of what you want.
Goofyfan wrote:I think I would have picked Tokyo.....But with the Damage that their reactor had....The radiation kind of scares me. So Paris for me.
The incident at Fukushima isn't having any effect on Tokyo (or most of Japan, for that matter).
Looking at the section for it on the (UK) government's travel advice website, the advice is just to not go into the 20km exclusion zone. It also points out that the risks are gradually declining (
https://www.gov.uk/foreign-travel-advic ... d-security (scroll down to the "Fukushima" section)). From what I can tell, most of the worry over it (other than in the immediate area, of course), is down to how it was reported in the media. As usual, the media put a lot of stories out that made it sound like the entire country was effected, when in reality it wasn't.
Basically, if you're visiting Japan, as long as you aren't going into the exclusion zone (which would be silly..), you're going to be fine. In Tokyo, there's actually no sign anything even happened. Everything's just "business as usual" (and from what I remember reading at the time, has been since a few days after the earthquake in 2011). In short, don't worry about it and enjoy your trip to Japan. It's an awesome, amazing place.
Wizzard419 wrote:Ignore the parks themselves for this, and first ask if you would be visiting the nearby major cities. If yes, then pick based on that, otherwise I probably would say just go for one of the Asian parks.
This. Don't go to, for instance, Tokyo Disney Resort and not actually look around Tokyo itself
In fact, you're probably better off going to visit Tokyo and taking a side-trip to the Disney resort. I stayed in Tokyo rather than at Disney and took the train to Disney (all the non-US resorts can be got to by train from the nearby cities VERY easily and cheaply), and the hotel was much cheaper than the ones at Disney, and I was much better positioned to get around Tokyo itself.
The best way to look at picking which resort to go to might be just to decide which part of the world you want to visit. Would you like to visit Paris, or Tokyo, or Hong Kong, or
somewhere else entirely?