Just thought I would write some quick messages to round off my trip experience...
Day One I've already covered mostly. After the park closed, the night was spent transferring my luggage from my old (non-Disney) hotel to the
Disneyland Hotel. This was further complicated by the fact that the taxi driver didn't actually know where Disneyland was, and had to keep stopping to ask people. I finally got to my room at about 4:30am, which is annoying given that I had the character breakfast booked for 6:45am! By the way, the archway for the entrance to SITRZ is still there - it still doesn't explicitly state "Welcome to Shanghai Disney Resort" but it's the closest we have to an entrance arch for SDR. It's located approximately at GPS coords (31.156702N, 121.672919E).
Day Two - character breakfast where I met Mickey, Minnie, Pluto and Goofy. None of the (fur) characters spoke English but their handlers did, so acted as translators. The characters didn't react amazingly to my comments (I made a "three musketeers" reference to Goofy and not even the handler had ever heard of the film) but they are okay and still made everyone smile.
I also met a lady at breakfast who I arranged to meet in the afternoon. But then I went to bed for a "nap" and didn't wake up until 7:45pm!! Oh dear... This comes from having a totally exhausting first day and also only having had about 30 minutes sleep the previous night. Still, I was gutted to miss so much park time. Eventually I got to the park gates at 10:05pm. The park closes officially at 10pm. Strangely, I still managed to get into the park and even more strangely they didn't even check my ticket!!
I then proceeded to have quite an interesting evening. First of all I went to Siren's Revenge, a pirate ship replica attraction. Apparently while I was in there, there were some announcements about the park having closed and everyone needs to leave, but I missed them because these announcements are not broadcast on the internal speakers within Siren's Revenge, which only play ship noises and various snippets of pirate speech (in Chinese). There were also others looking around the ship in plain clothes but I later found out they were actually staff members. They opened up a display cabin and I was able to check out some of the props inside there such as a skull paperweight and a series of pirate books (which were real books, but not the same ones shown on the cover). Eventually they asked me "what department are you in" and it then became clear they thought I was a staff member, I thought they were guests, and I had to leave the park.
On my way out I went to the Wandering Moon Teahouse to try to get some food as I know some food places are open late. (As I found out later, Remy's Patisserie is actually open until 11pm.) Anyway the teahouse was closed but some staff were still inside and one guy offered to take me to the staff canteen! First we went to a place called "Inn Between" which was closed. After this, he took me to a restaurant called "PAB" which apparently stands for "Project Administration Building". It's the first building which was built in the whole resort. Inside there were posters of other Disney parks, posters of Walt Disney quotes, a TV loop with greetings from other parks and photos/videos from around SDR, and a buffet area with the food. We got some really cheap and actually quite tasty food! It was really interesting to see the backstage area of SDR.
After that, he took me to near the park entrance and said I could find my own way out. So I walked to the exit but all the gates were already locked! It was around 1am by this time. No security in sight, only a lot of construction workers and cleaners. None of them spoke any English. I walked around the park for about 40 minutes before I found someone who spoke English and could get me out of the park. During this 40 minutes I walked straight into the boarding areas of some rides hoping to find security there, and even tried to call security on the security stations (control panels with phones and microphones attached at (approx 15) fixed positions around the park). But there didn't seem to be any security in the entire park at this time!!