Going to Disney? Lets go Downtown

Aug. 23, 2010 - PRLog -- Downtown Disney is a shopping, entertainment and dining district that spans over 120 acres in Disney World. It is open to the public and requires no admission fee, and it offers free parking and transportation to all the Disney World Resorts. This Outdoor based complex is divided into three areas The Marketplace, Pleasure Island and The West Side. Each area is distinguishable with its own theme and certain types of venues such as restaurants, stores and clubs. You will find many Orlando vacation rentals around the Disney resort so getting to the complex will be no problem.

The Marketplace which was formerly known as the Disney Village Marketplace is an area mainly has shops and quick service restaurants.

The West Side is home to the attractions of Downtown; here is where you would find the AMC 24 screen movie theatre, La Nouba from the world renowned Cirque du Soleil, the House of Blues restaurant and show auditorium where you will sample nightly live music, along with southern inspired dishes which follows their motto 'where music and food feed the soul'. You will also find a five floor indoor theme park called DisneyQuest, most the the attractions inside of it are virtual reality based and it also features various arcade machines. Guests enter the first-floor lobby and are transported via a "magic" elevator to the third floor atrium at the start of their visit. You can also find Planet Hollywood, Wolfgang puck and various other restaurants here.

Pleasure Island is probably the most well known out of all the areas. It is often thought to be themed after the Pleasure Island section in the book Pinocchio, in the book it was an Island where children were allowed to play and not do any work. But with the children being unsupervised they would smoke, drink and would behave badly, and because of this they would be turned into donkey's and have to work in the salt mines. But this isn't the case here - according to Disney's folklore the island's nightclub was once home to a shipping company that was owned by adventurous businessman Merriweather Pleasure, but he disappeared when a great storm had destroyed his business and only his warehouses remained. Years later the warehouses were refurbished and converted into nightclubs. This was mainly known for the night scene with its various nightclubs, but in 2008 Disney announced that they were going to replace all the night clubs in Pleasure Island with new stores and restaurants in the space of two years.

Pleasure Island was well known for celebrating New Year's Eve with fireworks every night at midnight, it was so well known that it was parodied in both The Simpsons, and also South Park had parodied Pleasure Island as well in the episode The Return of Chef where the character of Chef become a member of a club called the 'Super Adventure Club' (meant as a parody of Scientology). The layout of the headquarters of the Super Adventure Club was patterned after the interior of Pleasure Island's Adventurers Club; it is believed that the research for this episode was done on South Park co-creator Trey Parker's honeymoon.

So if you don't want to go to the theme parks of Disney then Downtown Disney proves to are other things to do in Disney.





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