Epcot Center

"Oh man, this place is full of lernin' stuff. Let's do the crash ride and leave", said by a 20 something behind me immediately after entering the park.

We weren't really thinking of going to Epcot but my wife wanted the girls to have breakfast with the characters. The one at the Castle in the Magic Kingdom is always sold out so we signed up for the Princess Breakfast in Norway. We arrived early as instructed and waited only about 20 minutes to be seated. Just inside the door was Belle doing photos with the kids. She was wearing a big puffy dress so I guess walking around among the tables wasn't going to work.

Once seated we were served an American Breakfast consisting of a fruit plate, biscuits, scrambled eggs, sausage and bacon. Yum. Once pretty much everyone had eaten the princesses came out one by one and worked their way from table to table. On this particular day we were treated to Sleeping Beauty, Mulan, Jasmine and Marry Poppins. Jasmine and Mulan are my girls' favorite characters so they were thrilled.

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After the breakfast we spent about 90% of the time at Epcot at the World Showcase. The food choices were usually better than the crappy burgers and pizza you get at Magic Kingdom and if you looked carefully the princesses were available for photo ops in their respective countries. Mulan was working China, Belle was working France and Jasmine (along with Aladdin and the Genie) were working Morocco. The United Kingdom had character greetings with Alice, Marry Poppins and Winnie the Pooh.

My wife especially like buying little doodads. The prices weren't too bad and you didn't have to fly there to get it cheaper. The girls ended up with matching Kimonos from Japan which I'm sure they will wear almost exclusively for days.

We did the ride in Norway but it was too dark and scary for the little girls. The China area had a 360° movie about China that was more appropriate. Germany didn't have much besides a Beer Garden. There was an American history show with movie and animatronic characters. Japan had Taiko Drummers and a storyteller. We really enjoyed Morocco which had a great band complete with belly dancer. France had some gourmet shopping. Great Britain had several characters available for photos. We didn't even stop in Canada as the girls were getting tired and cranky after visiting the other countries.

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Living Seas - Turtle Talk

The only other attraction we visited was the The Living Seas mostly to see the new Interactive Crush exhibit called Turtle Talk. It came highly recommended and it was kind of cool. They had a computer generated Crush (the turtle from Finding Nemo) who interacted with the kids who all sat up front. He asked the kids questions and then took questions from the kids, usually with amusing answers. Well done.

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