Flora, Food and Fun

Are Epcot’s festivals simply becoming modified versions of one another? At this point does it matter if you visit in the spring or the fall, because both the International Flower & Garden Festival and the International Food & Wine Festival are beginning to offer similar opportunities? As with most conversations that deal with Walt Disney World the answer is not a simple yes or no.

The Marketplaces, the little food serving cottages and the longtime standard the International Food & Wine Festival, crept into this year’s incarnation of the International Flower and Garden Festival. Flower and Garden’s kiosks focused on items grown in gardens, which put fruits and vegetables at the forefront of every dish. Food and Wine’s venues always focus on the freshest ingredients, but there generally isn’t a theme that runs through all of the Marketplaces as there was with Flower and Garden in 2013. Also, the number of Marketplaces needs to be considered. Flower and Garden weighed in with only about a dozen venues while Food and Wine typically boasts an assortment of kiosks just under thirty.

Switching main components, what about topiaries at the International Food and Wine Festival? They are there, but like the Marketplaces at Flower and Garden, there are nowhere near a comparable number in the fall. The garden areas of World Showcase are well manicured all year round, but during Food and Wine they do tend to take a slant towards ingredients in dishes. Cabbage in Morocco, pineapples and peppers in the promenade entrance, and the list goes on and on. So, while there aren’t as many topiary figures, the gardens are still an attraction unto themselves during Food and Wine.

The Festival Center, housed in the former Wonders of Life pavilion, is always abuzz with activity no matter which event you are attending. There is a difference, however, in who the special guests are. Chefs and culinary experts arrive in the fall to help guests in their kitchens and prepare some amazing dishes. Garden designers and horticulturists come along in the spring to assist guests in getting the most of their outdoor spaces. Even the merchandising opportunities, aside from the typical logo gear of the given event, are dramatically different.

Then there are the intangibles. Where Food and Wine has extra Marketplaces, Flower and Garden has water wise, butterfly, and creative gardens. Both have playgrounds for children to climb on when they get bored with their parents’ fawning over the food or flowers, and these play areas are generally tied into an upcoming or recent film release children would be interested in.

So, are the festivals becoming mirror images of each other? No. Are they utilizing the best aspects of both during either festival? Yes.

Food and flowers have both been ingrained in the fabric of Epcot since the beginning, long before there were even festivals to celebrate either of them. With the inclusion of Marketplaces into Flower and Garden, Epcot has given guests yet another reason to want to spend more time at the festival. Granted I would love to see the dishes offered up differ bit more from the Food and Wine offerings, beef to pork sliders and changing the cheese in the tomato salad doesn’t seem like to big a leap to me, but it was only the first year. Pristine gardens have always been a staple of Food and Wine, so it’s never been seen as a blending of the two, and yet it most certainly is.

If all guests are doing is walking casually around World Showcase, noshing here and there and taking note of the beautiful gardens, then I don’t suppose it truly matters during which festival time they visit. However, for those who truly take time to get under the surface of an event and want to take some tips home, even just those printed on placards in the gardens, it absolutely matters. Cooking aficionados aren’t going to gleam as much from a horticulturist as the gardening enthusiast is, and vice versa with chefs. Allowing the events to slightly bleed over into one another doesn’t detract from Flower and Garden or Food and Wine, it simply makes them a more accurate representation of the park in which they are housed and gives each a wider group of guests to appeal to.

Disney This Week - 26 May 2013

This Week – On the Main Street Gazette

Star Wars Weekends has a lot of magical elements to it, but it also has a lot of work left to do. Check out our report from the field.

You wold think retrieving a tree for The Land Pavilion would be easy, right? You'd be wrong...

Beverages from the Light Side and the Dark Side and a Dark Lord of the Sith cupcake? It must be time for some Star Wars Weekends Eats!

The World News Roundtable issued their editorials on the Grand Floridian announcement, the information available for the 24-hours park events, a new Muppet museum, and Golden Oak's newest neighborhood.

The Mad Hatter, or at least one of his hats, has ventured down from Fantasyland and into Storybook Circus.

Silent Saturday really dug the entrance to The Boneyard.

This Week – Around the Disney Blogosphere

Estelle Hallick makes the case for brunch in the parks at This Happy Place Blog.

Were you a member of the Magic Kingdom Club? If so, or if not, George Taylor takes Imaginerding readers down memory lane.

Suzannah Mitchell chronicles her 24 hours in the Magic Kingdom for the Monstrous Summer All-Nighter in Zannaland.

Mickey and the Magical Map is reviewed by Richard Tobin for Mouse Troop.

AJ Wolfe talks about one of our favorite dishes to whip up at home on The Disney Food Blog, 1900 Park Fare’s Strawberry Soup.

Candied strawberries may be gone from World Showcase, but Eating WDW and Sarah Holodick reminds us that Chocolate and Caramel Covered Grapes can still be found.

Melissa Sue Sorrells Galley has some fun compiling things Walt Disney never said at Mouse on the Mind.

The rationale for making the trip to the Walt Disney Family Museum is presented by Sam Gennawey on SamLand’s Disney Adventures.

Melissa Knight Coulter dishes on La Cantina de San Angel for Disney On Wheels.

Matt Hochberg attempts to answer the question, "Does the price of a restaurant matter?," at Studios Central with some thought-provoking results.

This Week – The Gazette Out and About

Don't forget to stop by the Main Street Gazette's Twitter page on Tuesday night at 8:00pm EST for Disney Post-It!

Silent Saturday - The Boneyard (December 2011)

Unbirthdays and All Days Between

No riddles to puzzle out here today folks, everyone can put on their thinking cap and figure out the reference this hatbox is making.

The clear nod here is to Alice in Wonderland’s Mad Hatter, but this box goes one step further and explains a long befuddling riddle of the Hatter’s cap. It has often been mentioned that the 10/6 slip of paper tucked into the band of the Mad Hatter’s hat was meant to be a size, even if the size was nonsensical. The true meaning of the 10/6, however, comes from the cost of the hat. Utilizing the currency of the realm, that is the standard of the British pound that was used during the time of Alice in Wonderland, the hat’s cost is ten schillings and sixpence. Hence the name of the hat company, Ten Schillings and Sixpence, Ltd.

Of course, if you’re a hatter in Wonderland and you’re shipping your wears off to Storybook Circus in the Magic Kingdom, you’re going to need a catchy slogan. Hats can be seen as special occasion accessory, but the Mad Hatter wants you to know that hats are good for every single day. To that point his motto is, “Hats for all occasions… Birthdays, Unbirthdays and all days between.”

World News Roundtable - 23 May 2013

Roundtable Contributors: Estelle Hallick (This Happy Place Blog), Alan Mize, Blake Taylor (BlakeOnline.com), Andrew (Disney Hipsters Blog), and yours truly.

A Grand Announcement

Alan Mize

It is an exciting time for DVC members right now.  Speculation is running rampant in regards to a future DVC expansion at the Polynesian Resort and construction has been coming along very nicely over at the Grand Floridian.  This week, the excitement grew even more when Disney finally announced the details of the new DVC wing at the Grand Floridian.  Officially called the Villas at Disney’s Grand Floridian Resort and set to open for business on October 23, points go on sale today to current DVC members and then will open up to the general public on June 19.  With an initial price point of $145 per point, it is actually surprisingly affordable compared to what many thought would be the initial sales point.  With the Grand Floridian being the most glamorous of the Walt Disney World Resorts, some people thought this new DVC resort would allow Disney to really push the envelope and charge $170 or more per point and get away with it.  It looks like they’ve decided to go a different route.  While the “per point” sales price is very reasonable, they appear to be really letting you have it on the points per night end of things.  For those families that need a 1 bedroom or larger villa for their Walt Disney World stays, it is going to cost a lot of points to stay at the Grand Floridian.

Pictures of the model room were also released this week, and I have to admit that it looks very nice.  While I’ve always enjoyed the atmosphere at the Grand Floridian, I’ve never been a huge fan of the room décor.  That is not the case for the model rooms.  They are certainly elegant and themed to the Victorian period that the Grand Floridian is known for, but the rooms still have a nice up to date feel to them.  I don’t get that “Grandma’s stuffy old house” feel from these pictures the way I do from the regular Grand Floridian rooms.  These new DVC villas are really shaping up to be very nice and I can’t wait to get the opportunity to stay there.  And now that the Grand Floridian is nearing completion, I can’t wait for Disney to confirm the rumors of a DVC expansion at the Polynesian.

Andrew (Disney Hipsters Blog)

Finally!  Disney announced this week the development, construction, and impending sale of a Grand Floridian wing of Disney Vacation Club. This will of course be old news for anyone who follows Disney news even in the slightest. Up until this week Disney had all but denied the existence of the project, despite the fact that construction has been visible from the monorail (and from the Magic Kingdom...) for months now. Nearing completion, the resort will surely take on the beautiful grandiose nature of the main building, and hopefully add a restaurant or bar to enhance the property. The only apparent downside at the moment is the lack of unique pool to the resort, though that will probably be installed in the coming months.

Let's all cross our fingers, and hope for a lounge along the lines of Bay Lake Towers own 'Top Of The World!'

Monstrous Queue

Blake Taylor (BlakeOnline.com)

Everyone knows there are differences between Disneyland and Walt Disney World, but the dissimilarities for the Monstrous All-Nighter are a bit absurd. As each destination prepares its own respective version of Friday's 24-hour operating day, Disney released a long list of instructions for how guests should line up outside the west-coast park prior to the 6 a.m. opening. The specific item that made my jaw drop was this beauty of a sentence: The early arrival queue will open to guests on Disneyland Resort property at 10 p.m. on May 23.

10:00? For real?

On the opposite side of the spectrum, there is strangely no list of instructions for WDW, perhaps since there doesn't need to be any. A head-scratching Google search later, I found that monorails will not start their run from the Transportation & Ticket Center to the Magic Kingdom until 5:15 a.m., 45 minutes before the park's opening. So while no one will be outside Magic Kingdom until less than an hour before rope drop, hoards of Disneyland guests will be waiting a whopping 8 hours prior to the event kickoff. That just bamboozles me. Why such a huge difference? Are the crowd-control tactics of each resort SO different that one needs an entire night of preparation while the other requires mere minutes?

Part of me thinks that simply because Disneyland stated an early start time, people will show up then and would not have arrived that early otherwise. The other side of my brain understands that, in the long run, it's probably a smart move that will only help organize a gargantuan crowd. I'm more familiar with WDW than I am DLR, so there are surely issues related to this topic (of "camping out" for the parks) that I simply have never experienced. But even still... I understand wanting to arrive on time, but 10 hours seems a bit much!

Muppet Museum

Estelle Hallick (This Happy Place)

Friends, biggest news of my life! The Muppets are officially going to be my neighbors in 2014-2015 with a permanent exhibition coming to the Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, Queens. Museum of the Moving Image is a great space that previously housed "Jim Henson's Fantastical World", a touring collection of many Henson artifacts. In addition, the Museum has hosted many events surrounding movies and documentaries.

Obviously, I am QUITE thrilled about this new Muppet haven that will be coming to New York. I'm already imagining all the future events that may come out of it: speakers, book signings, movie premieres (?!?!) and more. Nice to know the Muppets getting some love and will be a little bit closer to home.

Marceline Comes to Florida

Ryan P. Wilson (Main Street Gazette)

At one point or another, we've all had the dream of living in Walt Disney World. Whether it was plunking a home down in the middle of the vast wilderness that occupies much of Walt Disney World or just taking up residence in the Swiss Family Treehouse, the thought has crossed all of our minds. When Golden Oak was announced that dream became a reality for a select few, though most of us were just given something new to dream about.

This week Golden Oak unveiled plans for their second neighborhood in the compound, Marceline. Currently only nineteen quarter-acre homesites were announced, but each will be afford a view that will included either a waterway or nature preserve. The area, named after Walt Disney's childhood home, will also house a sculpture garden featuring statues of Snow White and her merry band of mischievous dwarfs.

The idea of Golden Oak has always intrigued me, and I'm sure I'd jump at the chance to move in if Walt Disney World offered it to me, but I prefer my dreams of the Treehouse or constructing a cozy, yet furnished with all the amenities, fort on the old Discovery Island. Walt Disney did so much to make dreams attainable for all of us that a community of homes that start at $1.6 million just seems like a step in the wrong direction.