I'm Back! Part 1

Salut à tous! Donc, je sais que j'ai été parti pour trois semaines et, comme c'est parce que j'étais en Floride! Ouais ... Je n'ai pas eu le temps de poster avant que je parte avec tous les emballages fous qui se passait, mais je suis de retour maintenant et devrait être reprendre à mon horaire régulier. Nous allons voir. Je suis rentré il ya deux semaines, a dormi huit heures, se leva et conduit avec ma grand-mère de retour à sa maison dans l'Oregon. Je suis resté là pendant deux semaines et puis quand je suis rentré j'ai eu huit heures par jour de pratique garde de couleur toute cette semaine passée. J'ai peut-être faire un voyage DECA cette semaine suivante, alors je suis bénévole pour une semaine au musée des enfants en ville et à travers tout cela, j'ai plus de pratique garde de couleur. En Septembre, j'ai éd école, de conduire, et la bande plus marcher (la pratique de la Garde de couleur). Beurk! Je vais aussi tourner seize demain (En août yay 19!!) Et sera essentiellement de partir à la recherche d'un emploi le jour de.

Hi everyone! So, I know I've been gone for like three weeks and that's because I was in Florida! Yeah... I didn't have time to post before I left with all the crazy packing that was going on but I'm back now and should be getting back on to my regular schedule. We'll see. I got home about two weeks ago, slept for eight hours, got up and drove with my grandma back to her house in Oregon. I stayed there for two weeks and then when I got back I had eight hour days of color guard practice this entire past week. I may be going on a DECA trip this following week, then I'm volunteering for a week at the children's museum in town and throughout all this I have more color guard practice. In September I have school, driver's ed, and more marching band (color guard practice). Yuck! I'll also be turning sixteen tomorrow (On August 19th yay!!) and will basically be heading out to look for a job the day of.

The trip was fantastic!! The first week we spent  at the Royal Pacific Resort Hotel which was on Universal Studios grounds. We were attending a Leaky Con conference during that week which is a harry potter conference. Call me what you will, but I loved it. It was absolutely fantastic to be surrounded by people that love harry potter and understand what the series is about, beyond the books. Harry Potter has represented so much more than a world wide obsession. It's helped people get through hard times in their life, it's provided inspiration, it's started charities and saved lives. It's inadvertently created so many opportunities for it's readers, and is such a true phenomenon, I wish everyone could appreciate the enormity of it. We got to see the final movie early and if you have never been to a midnight premiere of a harry potter movie then you would be so unprepared for this experience. At most of the midnight premieres, it is filled with mass group applause at all the great parts, mass group crying at all the sad, and mass group outrage at all the frustrating parts. It's crazy to experience the same feelings with so many other people at the same time. Well, when you attend a harry potter conference, multiply those emotions by like fifty. I'm not big on crying when other people are around me, so, yes, I cried during the movie, but I was nothing compared to the heavy- breathing hysterics that surrounded me. I don't blame them, maybe they are just loud criers, but I'm excited to see it with friends with a slightly less packed theater, surrounded by people who are unaware of the slightly insane mentality of true harry potter fans.

I'm going to first list the negatives of those two weeks, so I can get them out of my system. To begin with, this trip began with me boarding my first ever plane. I really was not nervous at all getting on the plane, but all of a sudden, I was crammed into these tiny seats next to a lot of people in this cylindrical container that I was expected to believe was going to whiz around in the sky. I started giggling nervously (as I do when I'm excitedly nervous), and then I started crying, heaving sobs, and then I started laughing again, and then I felt sick. This continued in a vicious cycle until we were in the air. I guess I had a panic attack, and I had no idea where it had come from. It was very bizarre, but luckily, short-lived. The ride home, thank god, was not accompanied by such hysterics, much thanks to my little brother who was sitting next to me. He closed the window shade and told me to look at him. He made me laugh and calmed me way down. It also helped a little that I was pretty much floored off xanax. I was drowsy the rest of the six hour plane ride and kept falling asleep. I didn't like it very much since I felt very weak, and not in control, and will probably not take xanax again.

When we arrived my mom wanted to go straight to the harry potter park. We went there, me on two hours of sleep, shaky from the plane ride, and an empty stomach, got on the forbidden journey ride and nearly puked my guts up getting off. My mom, on the other hand, felt fantastic. She had lost 105 pounds to ensure she got on that ride, which had been criticized for having some serious weight restrictions. The harness fit without a hitch and we cried happy tears through the whole ride. It was fantastic and so is my mom. During the portions of the ride that I wasn't contemplating whether or not they would charge me for damage caused by barfing all over their virtual screens, I really enjoyed it. It's the most immersive ride I've ever been on, a whole new kind of ride. You begin strapped in to this little row of seats, sort of like those roller coasters that hold you from the top of the harness. You zoom around in and out of screens that move around similar to soarin (a ride in Disney world), and then out into real rooms that are decorated to continue the adventure. It was really amazing but, due to my shaky body and low tolerance for VR rides, I was not doing too hot, getting off. It floored me for about another day, but by the next, I was doing fine. The food there was fantastic and the conference was amazing. There were a lot of problems with registration in the beginning, which tarnished that portion of the trip a little bit, but every other part that was not spent waiting in lines was great! On this trip, I do believe, I developed macrophobia, the fear of prolonged waiting, due to these lines. We waited three hours to get our registration figured out (and missed our dinner reservations), then we waited two hours to get books signed by visiting authors and had the doors closed in our faces, then we waited for two hours to meet Evanna Lynch (the girl who plays Luna), Scarlett Byrne (the girl who plays Pansy Parkinson in the last movie), Chris Rankin (the guy who plays Percy Weasley), and the kids who played the children of harry and Ginny, and Hermione and Ron. At the end of this two hour wait, in which we missed our dinner reservations, we were told that we weren't going to meet them because they had decided to not continue to the rest of the rooms. That was a serious blow, and by that point I was so sick of waiting in lines, only to have nothing happen, that I really was numb to the information.

The conference, though, was fantastic. The content of the discussions and lectures and everything was just great. Everyone was really funny and all the sessions were organized really well. Some of the names of the programs I attended included: a discussion on what the 12 Fail Safe Ways to Charm Witches were (that was really funny and totally true), I attended a very exciting informational meeting about pottermore (which if you haven't heard of, you're probably not that big of a fan so don't worry about it and also I will be posting more on that very soon), some QA's with John Green, some other YA authors, and the actors that were attending.  There were a lot more but it all seems like one long blur. The ball was great. I got sooo many compliments. I had a lot of people say I looked like a princess and like belle, so that was a nice ego-boost for moi. My dad and my brother who wore their tuxes looked so handsome and my sister and mother also looked great. I'll be posting pictures as soon as I get access to the camera we took the pictures with. We ate a lot in the hotel's restaurants and Jake's had fantastic flat bread pizza. Probably some of the best pizza I've ever had. There were two Emeril restaurants in the area and we never had time to eat there so I was sad about that but there's always some other time.

The park was just, perfect. When we first walked into it our first night there I balled my eyes out. It is the most surreal feeling in the world. They constructed the castle so that it rises up in the back right out of the shops of Hogsmeade. I thought I was there for one blissful minute. I miss it already, but most of all I wish that it was truly real. It's hard to be so in love with a place that is merely an imitation of a fictional world. Adding to the surreal effect was the fake snow glistening off of all the rooftops. It seemed to be laughing at me as I stood in ninety degree heat with 85% humidity levels. I went on the dueling dragons roller coaster which was pretty crazy. The griffin ride I didn't get to go on because after waiting for an hour in line and having the ride break down twice, my sister and I decided to get the hell out of there. The three broomsticks didn't have the best food ever (although breakfast was good) but the butterbeer is to die for. Agh, I miss that stuff! Honeydukes was really cool and filled with candy. Zonko's was nice as far as decoration goes but the products weren't as great as I would have liked. Ollivanders, which extended into Dervish and Banges had wands and lots of general harry potter merchandise. I bought a gryffindor t-shirt at the gift shop that was located at the end of the forbidden journey ride and a wand.

We saw the movie before a lot of the country and I thought it was fantastic! I don't know if they did this at other theaters but we got 3-D glasses in the shape of harry potter's glasses. That was really funny and actually made wearing 3-D glasses enjoyable. Really the only point in the whole movie that just bugs the hell out of me was the part when Harry tells Ron and Hermione that he's going into the forest to die. Not only is this totally redundant to Harry's character but Ron and Hermione let him go. Harry is a selfless figure, hence the reason he doesn't tell anyone in the book about going to the forest because he knows they would stop him. Then with Ron and Hermione, they would never have allowed him to go into the forest to sacrifice himself. There have been similar instances in the previous movies done by David Yates that have irritated me because he just doesn't understand that relationship. Besides that one point of contention though, everything eles that bothered me I can get over. The conference concluded with lots of tears. There was such a wonderful connection between people at these conferences and I really hope to get the opportunity to attend the next one.

Universal was fun, but a lot, a lot, of walking. We ate at Margaritaville on the boardwalk by Universal Studios that had really good steak. The park was really fun and I especially liked the Rip Ride Rocket. Here is a video I found of it on youtube and also one of the dueling dragons ride at Harry Potter World.

The rest of Universal was a lot of fun, as well. There are a lot of ride/shows. The shows are really interactive. One of my favorite was the make your own movie one where you go in and they select a couple people from the crowd to "act" in the movie. Our host was really funny and we had an end of the world sort of movie. You watch them "shoot" the movie with the "actors" not really knowing what the scenes will be like since most of them are done in front of green screens. At the end they had the whole group go into a subway car and we were told to act scared as different effects happened. They had an oil rig almost hit us and fire, explosions, and at the end unleashed A LOT of water. That part actually scared me because I hate subways (claustrophobic) and drowning, so that was like my two worst fears. Seriously, it felt like being in one of those subway cars in the end of the world movies where they flood the stations. Anyways at the end of it you go out and watch your movie all put together. It was really, really, funny and that was probably my favorite show there.

Below are some pictures from the Universal portion. They are not the best pictures because I was half-delirious from the heat, but they are pictures nonetheless.

This is the Hogwarts Express that was stationed at the entrance of the park.

Not sure who this random person in the background is but this is the Owl Post,
which is actually only a store front. I've heard that the park may be
expanding and turning a lot of the store fronts into real stores.

These are the house point's containers which you could see while
standing in line inside the castle to get onto the Forbidden Journey ride.

This is the hippogriff that, in the books, is located outside Dumbledore's office and leads into it.  This was also in the castle and could be seen while waiting in line for the ride.

There were picture frames everywhere in the castle, just like in the books. Some of them
were animated so that they were moving and talking.

Also in the castle is Dumbledore's office.

This is a shot of the inside of Ollivander's shop.

This is the back of my brother who was chosen to be "picked" by his wand.  It was a really cool experience and  "Ollivander" was very funny.

From Universal we hired a driver to take us and our many, many, many, bags of luggage to the Grand Floridian Resort Hotel located in Disney World.

I will be posting about that part of our trip later. I've been writing this post  for like a week and just want to get it published.

Posting on the fall couture lines is coming, I promise!

French word of the day: Universelle which is the French word for universal.

Au Revoir!

"Anyone can get dressed up and glamorous but it is how people dress in their days off that are the most intriguing." - Alexander Wang.