Around the World

There's not much better than waking up at 4:30, to get on an early flight to WDW. The night before I spent finishing up an updated resume, cover letter, and portolio summary of a couple website and videos. I sent a copy of each to a couple design companies that Disney contracts (Kirk Design and Thinkwell) and packed a couple.

We met at 5 at the union, boarded vans, and headed to our NW flight. We had each done a short report on a given attraction or space for Tuesday, and Sarah Happy had been kind enough to assemble them into a book we each got. My topic was monorails. I had the pleasure of sitting next to Dr. D on the flight and hearing a little bit about his encounters with imagineering regarding animal kingdom, and the clash with his Africanist background. Mostly I read the imagineering field guide and finished shaping questions for the imagineer we were meeting later that day.

Disney's Magical Express service bus took us to Port Orleans Riverside resort, with a 30 minute video going over all the parks and major attractions at WDW. At the hotel we met up with Ray Silverman, director of UM museum studies who helped organize the conference last week, and Scott Mallwitz, lead experience designer at Henry Ford and designer of the Disney exhibit. We met him on the first trip to HF.

There was no time to take the planned monorail trip but we put our stuff in our rooms and headed on a bus to Celebration. We had some time to grab lunch, which the adults and a couple of us did at Columbia's cuban place. The art deco Celebration seemed a very successful example of new urbanism. We didn't have time to walk around much, but their was a social aspect apparant that isn't there in suburbs or large cities.

more later.