I’m really needing a Disney fix. I can tell because over Christmas I was totally obsessed with looking at Disney fine jewelry charms, and ferreting out little companion jewels that could be layered into a charm necklace. It’s tricky for a grown woman to retain her credibility while wearing a Snow White reference, and even thornier to pull off Cinderella. I am way too old for this, but here we are.

The last time I was like this was the summer of 2013, when we came to the U.S. for six weeks to see our family, and somehow spent an excessive number of hours in front of the Disney channel, saccharine sitcoms and all. Naturally such an enterprise would not have Communist Party approval, so we had no access at home in China. That’s not to say we never saw a Mickey, because we were actually swimming in Chinese knock-offs, most of which had a cheap and broken air, the kind of feeling you get when you bite into a beautiful cake and realize someone dropped an entire eggshell in the batter.

Since moving to China in 2011, we’d heard Hong Kong Disneyland was little more than a kiddie slide and a couple of puddles, so we’d been excitedly holding out for the grand opening of Shanghai Disneyland, which was located less than an hour from our house—for a bunch of Disneyphiles, it doesn’t get much better than that. We’d even driven as close as we could to the construction site, and taken long range photos of the castle as it was being built, but in the end it wasn’t enough to slake our thirst. By 2013 we’d decided that kiddy park or no, we needed to see what Mickey sounded like in Cantonese.

In Hong Kong we emerged from the special Mickeyed up subway train into a beautiful, cool station where Mary Poppins would have looked perfectly natural spit spotting about with her parrot umbrella and high button shoes. We didn’t know it yet, but it was to be one of those moments when the cake is not only beautiful, but the first bite reveals a stunning ganache with little flakes of edible 14k gold winking from the middle. Halfway through the first day we exchanged our tickets for annual passes which never had a chance to gather dust.

To be fair to all the naysayers, Hong Kong Disneyland had opened very small and catered to the youngest children, the ones being watched by their grandparents while their mothers and fathers were at work. But expansion had rolled on, and three new lands had appeared. When we stumbled onto the scene in 2013, Mystic Point was still brand spanking new; that’s where we met Mystic Manor, the Chinese Haunted Mansion, sort of.