Mickey's Not So Scary Halloween Party!

Once again, it's been a while but things are really busy out here. The International Food and Wine Festival begins today at EPCOT so the chances are you'll hear even less from me as we're going to be even busier. For the people who don't know, Food and Wine is a festival where Disney set up stalls from all over the world that sell the food types from that country. It means they can include foods from countries not featured in world showcase such as Australia, New Zealand, Spain, Portugal etc. They also have a Scottish one where you can get haggis, yuck!

Over in the American pavillion during Food and Wine, they have stars put on concerts. At the start of November, David Cassidy is playing. I was quite excited but everyone else I've spoken to (beside my mum) have no idea who he is! If I get the chance, I may pop over on my day off and see him live in concert. Shame it's not Donny Osmond though.

Even though I've been doing alot of working recently, I've had a little time to play around. The other night, I was in my apartment reading when the phone rang. It was Kevin inviting me up to the pool. When I got up there I found a huge group of us, Pippa, Lauren N, Nic, David, Danielle, Andy, Emma, Josh, Chloe, Kevin....We all went swimming. It was around midnight! I found it really weird to be swimming under the stars at gone midnight but it was brilliant. Only here in Florida could you do that! A few days later, I went up there again, this time with Sam, Vikki, Pippa, Lauren N and David. Looks like midnight swims may be a regularly scheduled event!

On Tuesday night, I went to Mickey's Not So Scary Halloween Party at the Magic Kingdom. We've all been talking about this for about a week and Rhys rang me in a panic to say he didn't have a costume. I told him to get an old white shirt and some black trousers and come round. He came round later with a brand new shirt and trousers but he didn't mind too much when we jumped on them and cut them to ribbons. Unfortunately, I only have nail scissors out here so we had to use those to carefully cut off the arms and the legs. Then he took his shirt out onto the balcony while I rummaged around in my cupboard for my art supplies. Armed with a kids tub of red paint, we fell to work on this shirt. I poured paint into my hands and rubbed them together, then Rhys held his shirt while I did two bloody handprints across it. I got rather into it and made sound effects which freaked out Rhys. It was great fun. Rhys rubbed some dirt into the shirt and in the end, it looked pretty good.

My costume was alot easier. A while ago I brought a children's Pocahontas costume from Downtown Disney. It's for a 10-12 year old but I have no problem getting into it. They must have really huge 10-12 year olds out here! Unfortunately, I didn't have any shoes to go with it but luckily I'd asked my mum to send out my boots from home. They arrived that morning (my mum is amazing!!!). Vikki went as Alice in Wonderland and looked brilliant! People actually mistook her for the actual Alice more than once! Vikki's boyfriend, Dan pulled his costume together at short notice but made a really decent Indiana Jones. Our roommate Nami was a cowgirl while Nic and Lauren were just Halloweeny like with wands and pumpkin necklaces.

We met up with alot more people at the park. Tom looked really scary as a red devil and Lynda, Alex, Corinne and Nia were the "Not So Scary Fairies". Everyone wanted to do different things so we branched off into smaller groups. I went with Vikki and Dan and we did the rides. As Not So Scary is a ticketed event, the lines for the rides were pretty much non existant. We rode Thunder Mountain and as it was empty, we went in a seat each. I was in the middle behind Vikki and in front of Dan. Halfway through the ride, I got distracted from the actual rollercoaster because Vikki was sliding from one side of the seat to the other with every turn. Her Alice costume slid really well so for the whole ride she was sliding across her seat, pulling herself up and then sliding the other way. I was in stitches, it looked so funny and I could hear Dan laughing behind me. Even Vikki laughed as she struggled to stay upright. It was brilliant!

As part of Not So Scary, the park sets up "Trick or Treat candy spots" where you go over and they give you a handful of sweets. They had loads of these scattered throughout the park so we ended up with bulging bags of sweets by the end. That should keep me going for the rest of the year!

The Magic Kingdom was all decorated for Halloween in orange and black. As it got darker, the place was shrouded in orange and green lights with mist snaking its way out of the castle. All the characters were in halloween costume and it was so spooky and atmospheric. The fireworks, "Hallowishes" were amazing. They had ghost outlines shooting up the castle walls. The Boo To You Parade was great too. It started off with the headless horseman racing down mainstreet. Then came all the floats with the villains on. They had people giving out sweets at the end so we all stuck our bags out.

All in all, it was a fantastic night. We had so much fun but boy were we exhausted by the end of it! We got a taxi home and fell asleep around 2am. Scarily enough, that's an early night for us out here.

There's a throw in tonight for the new hires. We have two groups to throw in as they came within weeks of each other so it should be good. They've altered the throw in slightly and it's now themed as "cowboys and indians". I'm lucky I don't need a costume as I can use Pocahontas again. Vikki's going as a cowgirl. It should be another good night.

Bye for now!