Awesome August : Day 21

Have you ever had one of those dreams that is so realistic and awful that even then you wake up, you feel weird for the rest of the morning?  Especially if that dream involves someone you love and someone you have to interact with.  That was me today... So, to counteract the yucky feeling, I ended up doing things that I love.

The Queen and I went to a morning showing of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows part 2 since she hadn't seen it yet.  The theater was surprisingly packed for a Sunday morning nearly over 2 months after the release.  And since I hadn't seen it since the midnight premier (which was fun but very loud), I was able to pick up lines of dialogue that I missed the first time (since we were all laughing or cheering or crying), like this one:

I've always loved the way the films have portrayed Seamus.  I thought that he was kinda shafted after about book 5 and he was always a fun character.  This scene just proves it.  But I digress...

Then I ended the night by seeing Cowboys & Aliens with Boyfriend and his dad.  I feel like that whole movie is the set up for a joke like, "James Bond and Han Solo walk into a saloon..."  But I actually enjoyed it way more than I thought I would.  I should probably mention that leading up to the film's release, every time I saw the trailer in a theater I looked around to make sure I wasn't hallucinating and that the film really existed.

All in all the movies and the company cured me of my bad dreams. :)

Awesome August : Day 1

Every year, the week leading up to my birthday, I celebrate the WOM – the Week of Meg.  This basically gives me an excuse to be sorta selfish and demanding, but also do a bunch of fun things before my actual birthday.  Usually this includes going to my favourite restaurants, seeing my favourite people, and getting pedicures.

Anyway, I'm usually in such a good mood during that whole week that I figured, why not try to keep it going.  So, I'm going to try Awesome August : 31 days of awesome things.

As we know, my love of Harry Potter is no secret.  But what might not have been well known is my love for the Malfoy family.  I happen to think that Draco, Lucius, and especially Narcissa are some of the most interesting characters in the story.  So, when my sister, Bear, went to get me a Harry Potter related birthday gift, Draco came to mind...

This is part of the first sentence of Chapter 10 Halloween from Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone and it's actually cut from the book itself.  The first word is Malfoy and the M can also double for Meg... So nerdy and narcissistic – just like me!

What book would you wear an except from around your neck?  I know Bear's holding out for The Lord of the Rings...

Wizard Rock & Dinosaur Cake

One of my most awesome nerdy loves is Wizard Rock.  Oh, you've never heard of Wizard Rock?  It's cool, let me explain.

A Quick (and probably inaccurate) History of Wizard Rock:
I'm fairly certain that you can call Led Zeppelin the Godfathers of Wizard Rock.  If I have to explain that to you, we are no longer friends for at least 3 reasons... But that was back in the day.

In the early 2000s a band called The Switchblade Kittens wrote a song called "Ode to Harry Potter" which was from Ginny's POV in Chamber of Secrets.

A little while later, in 2002, two brothers somewhat jokingly formed a band called Harry and the Potters and wrote a bunch fast and sloppy songs about the first few Harry Potter books and from Harry's POV.

After that, the world exploded – Wizard Rock caught on BIG TIME and now along with Harry and the Potters and their evil counter-parts, Draco and the Malfoys, you can find tons and tons of other Wizard Rock bands (there was even a Wizard Rock EP of the Month Club for a couple of years and Christmas CDs and everything)!

And now you know.

So, anyway, the champions and reigning kings of Wizard Rock are still Harry and the Potters.  At some point their cute, few-lined, silly songs turned into really good, introspective, interesting, and often hilarious songs.  They're pretty good and are super fun to watch live (Boyfriend said that if they practiced they might be really good, but he also said he wants to join the band and play bass as Cho Chang, so I'm not sure I can take him seriously anymore).  They get so into the songs and into the characters (one brother plays as HP year 4 and the other as HP year 7) and there is tons of bantering and Wizard jokes.

I saw them for the second time this weekend at the Sunnyvale Public Library.  It was hot, outdoors, and there wasn't a huge crowd.  Still, it was a good show in the way that a show is good when a lot equipment gets knocked over and one of the Harry Potters is wearing his sweater backwards for half the set before noticing. 

They played a lot of the songs off their earlier albums which was fun (though "Power of Love" is hands-down their best album). And their drummer apparently keeps changing his identity at each show – at our he was Sirius Black. They also made a Pog joke that kinda fell flat, but I suspect that's because 3 of us in the crowd were old enough to know what Pogs were... And Boyfriend was stoked over their many Back to the Future references, too!

Also, before the show I bought their super awesome, punk rock 12" vinyl record "Live at the New York Public Library" (I collect records, too) and met the band – brothers Paul and Joe.  My dear friend, Kate, has been friends when them for ages, so she insisted that I go introduce myself at the show (she had warned(?) them that I would be saying hi when she saw them a few days earlier in San Diego).  I was wearing my Pterodactyl dress in preparation for the next part of my night and the boys – in a moment of absolute hilarity – tried to invite themselves to the Jurassic Park Party I was going to next, then realized they had another show to play in Santa Cruz.  That, my friends, is the drawing power of the dinosaur.

Which brings me to later that night...

My friend Peter, aka The Mayor, had been putting off his birthday for so long that I decided to swoop in and declare it a Jurassic Park Themed event.  Unfortunately, this didn't really work as Boyfriend and I were the only one who stuck to the dinosaur theme (my dress, his t-shirt)... Oh, and our friend maRk did bring dinosaur toys, so there was that.

But, not realizing that everyone would be total Flounders, I had spend the morning getting dinosaur type goodies ready for Peter: some candy that looked like dinosaur eggs, chocolate rocks, dinosaur toys, and a dinosaur cake, which ended up looking more like Reptar from Rugrats than the actual cake tin (because I frosted it backwards)...  Still, we had a good time at dinner and then went and drove go-karts before eating the dinosaur cake.

All in all, awesome Saturday night.  Did you do anything amazingly awesome, too?

Also, find out more about Harry and the Potter's Ride the Lightening 2011 summer tour here!

I [heart] Harry Potter OR How writing about a trip took on a life of it's own

Note: I started the post intending to just write about my trip to The Wizarding World of Harry Potter.  Somehow, it turned into an epic about my love of HP.  Sorry if I bore you – you can skip to the review at the bottom.

If you've ever met me (which, let's face it, everyone who is reading this has), then you know how big of a Harry Potter fan I am.  I'm so vocal about my love that it's sometimes strange to those around me.  Case in point: the time I bought this Hold Steady shirt and commented to the Merch guy that it was like a mashup of my two favorite things: The Hold Steady and Harry Potter.  The Merch guy wasted no time in telling me it was meant to be an Elvis reference.  Whatever, dude.

I was a little late for the Harry Potter game, inasmuch as I hadn't read any of the books when the first film came out in 2001.  This isn't really surprising because I had just graduated from high school and, at the time, HP was mostly marketed towards younger kids in the States (one of my sisters, who is 6 years younger than me, was reading them at the time, so I didn't think much of investigating them and I had been busy doing the angry-high-school-punk-rock-thing for those 4 years between the first book and the first movie).  But my Dad had this conference at a Century Theater nearby and he invited me and Bear to go with him, as there was going to be private screening of Harry Potter & The Sorcerer's Stone afterwards.  I went along for the company (my Dad is amazing) and because there was breakfast, but I wasn't that interested in the film.  In the end I was blown away. 

Two things happened that day after the movies.  First, I bought my '99 Honda Civic (that I would eventually christened Narcissa after the HP character), and secondly, I took that first drive in my new car down the Barnes & Noble and bought the first 4 HP books – everything that had been released at the time.  I was hooked.  I think my sisters and I saw Sorcerer's Stone like 5 times in theaters (a record only topped by our seeing Fellowship of the Ring at least 7 times in theaters – and yes, I do realize that is 21+ hours of my life, thankyouverymuch.  It was worth it). 

So, anyway, I'm a huge fan and have been for 10 years now and I've spent countless hours discussing theories and characters and listening to the audio books...*  So, imagine my excitement when I heard that they were going to be adding a section called The Wizarding World of Harry Potter to Universal Studios, FL.  And then imagine my disappointment when I watched all of my other friends who are Potter fans go experience the magic without me.  When I found that I was going to be on the East Coast for my Cousin's wedding, I figured, why not just pop down to Orlando?  So I did.  And Boyfriend flew out to meet me for 2 amazing days in...

The Wizarding World of Harry Potter!! 

So, was it everything I hoped and dreamed it would be?  I don't know...

The most impressive part of the whole thing is the area itself.  It really feels like walking into Hogsmeade, walking into a different country all together, with all the storefront windows.  There are all these little details everywhere.  Every time I walked by a shop, I noticed something new.  Though, it was strange to see this town in perpetual winter being swarmed by people in shorts and tee-shirts!  Walking into a real-life version of Honeydukes (where I bought Ton Tongue Toffee, Fizzing Whizzbees, Chocolate Frogs, and Bertie Botts Every Flavour Beans), Zonko's (where they sell You-No-Poo), and Ollivander's was like a dream.  And it is worth the wait to see Ollivander help someone pick out their first wand – or rather, have someone's first wand pick them? And, of course, we tried the Butterbeer.**

Boyfriend and I also had early admission so we high-tailed it straight for Harry Potter and the Forbidden Journey because we heard that the line could take hours.  But, because it was so early, we  pretty much walked on. Usually this wouldn't be something to complain about, but, seeing as half of the appeal of this ride is that the line is a walk through Hogwarts, it would have been nice to see everything more slowly.  And here's some slightly embarrassing honesty – I found this ride horrifying. Seriously.  I had to cover my eyes for a good portion of it (spiders, you know).  I can't imagine what the average kid that would think, as it's basically all the scary parts of the books rolled into one disorienting ride.

On the other hand, I LOVED the Dragon Challenge ride (which Boyfriend and I were calling Dueling Dragons, and unbeknown to us, that was it's pre-Wizarding World name). Not only was it just a fun ride, but seeing the other "dragon" fly under and around you is pretty awesome.  Also, if anyone asks, Chinese Fireball > Hungarian Horntail.  

One thing I found a little strange is that there almost no reference to anything past Goblet of Fire... And, as Boyfriend pointed out, there are no mascots like at Disneyland, though they did have a Hogwarts Choir and a Tri-Wizard rally, but damn, how awesome would it be to see Hagrid walking around?!  The section is also pretty small with just 3 rides, the shops, and the Three Broomsticks/Hog's Head.  We didn't need two full days to do everything, but we majorly lucked out and, according to employees there, both days we were there were very quiet – I guess on busy days they limit who can enter that section.

 We also had a lot of fun at the rest of the park – Islands of Adventure is more ride oriented than regular Universal Studios, apparently.  The Hulk and Spiderman rides in the Marvel section were awesome.  Boyfriend finally got to go on the Jurassic Park ride, which I had been on like 13 years ago and had remembered it much scarier than it actually is (I also realized that I had never seen the film Jurassic Park because, as I explained to Boyfriend, I was a 10-year-old girl when it came out and thus did not care).  The Lost Continent section featuring Poseidon's Fury was a big hit with me, and Boyfriend successfully kept the teasing to a minimum through Seuss Landing, which kinda scares the crap out of me (his artwork makes me very uncomfortable, but that's a different story).  We mainly just had fun being on vacation.

So here is my final verdict: The Wizarding World of Harry Potter is an awesome, but small section of a park and I am glad that I went.  It really is worth seeing if you're anything of a fan, but you probably don't need to base an entire trip around going.  In the future, I'd probably plan a trip to Magic Kingdom and save one day to head back to Wizarding World...  All and all, I did have a blast, but I'm also anxious to see if/how they continue to develop this section of the park.

*Fun fact: all of my devices (laptop, iphone, ipod, etc.) are all named after HP characters, and mostly from the Most Noble & Most Ancient House of Black. Also, my new car is called Kingsley.

**I didn't like Butterbeer that much, but I got the cold one, not the frozen one as was recommended. Personally, liked the one that my Cousin Kate and I made with Butterschnapps better... 

[all photos by endlessmeg or boyfriend]