Disneyland Trip - Day 1: Downtown Disney | Phil's America Exchange Year

Where is "The happiest place on Earth"? I believe most people would say it's Disneyland. I've been looking forward going to Disneyland for months since I moved to California, and today, Feb 8th, was like dream come true, we were going to Anaheim for 3 days during the break! Anaheim is where Disneyland Resorts California located, including the original, oldest Disneyland Park, California Adventure Park, and Downtown Disney District. We planned to go Downtown Disney to have dinner and do some shopping on the first day, and visit the parks on day 2 and 3.

A restaurant in Downtown Disney- Rainforest Cafe

After finishing packing our cloths and supplies, we started heading to Anaheim at about 2 PM, driving to Anaheim basically takes about 1.5 hours, but it depends on the traffic on highway, since we were not on it during rush hours, it didn't take us too long. Good enough for me to watch a movie... Haha. But sometimes we were still stuck on the highway, and Karen told me: "This is how LA's traffic looks like all the time."

Watching Movie on my iPad. This movie is called Side Effects, a 2013 film.

Traffic....

The hotel we were staying in was called "Alpine Inn", it is not a fancy hotel, but it is really close to Disneyland, and their rooms are clean as well, so I think it's pretty good. After checking in and unloading packages, we started heading to Downtown Disney. Downtown Disney is an outdoor shopping, dining, and entertainment area located at the Disneyland Resort between Disneyland and California Adventure that Disney built recently. There are some nice stores and restaurants in Downtown Disney, including a gigantic Lego store and Disney store. We had dinner in a restaurant called Rainforest Cafe, it is so popular that we have to do reservation few days before we go. I think the reasons why it is so popular are because is a themed restaurant that kids will really like, and the decorations is restaurant are fantastic, you will feel just like you're in a real rain forests, and their foods are good, too.

We can see the back side of Cars Land in the hotel.

There is a small pool in the hotel.

Our room.

Boys/Mine room and Dad/Mom's room are connected.

Hotel lobby. Very basic, but nice.

Heading to Downtown Disney

Anaheim Convention Center

Disney Paradise Pier Hotel

Downtown Disney!

Believe or not, you can find elephants, gorillas, and other rainforests-animals in this restaurant. Before going into the actual restaurant, we will past through a gift shop first, I think their design is good that people will not be bored while waiting for their seats. And when we were entering the restaurant, the waiter said something like "Welcome Berryhill family to the safari", which is pretty interesting. There are a giant aquarium at the entrance of the restaurant, and at the second floor, there are elephants and gorillas that will make noises every half a hour when thunder storm comes. Yes, when thunder storm comes every half a hour! Isn't that cool!

Outside of the restaurant.

The shop

The entrance of the restaurant.

Menu.

Decorations...It's fantastic!

Elephants!

It's all in the restaurant!

After dinner, we went to the Lego store. Boys were very looking forward going there, and they really had a good time there. There are all kinds of Lego series in Lego store, from the basic Lego City to Lego Architecture for adults, all you can find. And then we went to the Walt Disney Store, this Disney store in Downtown Disney is gigantic, walking from one side of the store to the other may take 3 minutes, and you can find everything about Disney here, t-shirt, soundtracks, toys, foods, everything. Downtown Disney have many other stores, but due to our limited time, we didn't visit all of them, but this is definitely the place to visit!