DISNEYLAND!!!

On Friday 4/24 Anne and I went to the Tokyo Disney Resort to enjoy a full day at Disneyland. It is located roughly 45 minutes by train from our apartment in the far northwest of Tokyo. Both Anne and I have been eyeing Disneyland for some time, anxiously waking for the weather to warm up. I was lucky enough as a child/early teen to see Disney World in Orlando several times growing up and Anne had the opportunity to see both Disney World in Orlando and Disneyland in Anaheim. Since neither of us has been to a Disney park in over 10 years we were excited to finally get a chance to go back to one. I am told that the Disneyland in Tokyo is the same as the Disneyland in California. Many of rides I remembered from Disney World were there. My favorite is the Pirates of the Caribbean (though it was weird to see that they now include the characters from the 3 movies of the same name). They had the Haunted Mansion, It’s a small world after all – Anne’s favorite (in Japanese), my mother’s favorite – the spinning tea cups, Space Mountain, and on, and on, and on. If you would like to see all of the attractions check it out at - www.tokyodisneyresort.co.jp/index_e.html.

We woke up at 7:00am to make it to the park when it opened at 9:00am. We arrived slightly before 9am to see about 1,000 people waiting for the gates to open. Fortunately for us most of these people had already purchased their tickets so the ticket lines were very short. We made a clockwise circle of the park and discovered some rides had 60-100 minute wait times. Fortunately many of the big/more popular rides have a fast pass feature, meaning that you can use your entrance ticket to get a pass that allows you to bypass the long lines on the ride (one time, with an hour window). As more people got the fast passes the later the hour window became. There were two rides that we were unable to ride on due to long waits. Pooh’s Honey House, average wait was over 100 minutes and the fast pass time was 8 hours out (so at noon you would have to wait until 8pm before you could use your fast pass) and the Monsters Hide and Seek which just opened on 4/15/09. One of the most popular food items in the park were souvenir tubs of flavored popcorn. The varieties were salted, honey, curry, and caramel. If you can ignore me being strange and just look at the cool Pooh tub we got you can see why they were so popular. They also had Churros which was a little weird, but also very popular and very good. Anne and I really enjoyed ourselves and saw just about everything including 2 parades (one during the day and one at night) and the fireworks show at the end of the night. At 9:30pm or so we got back on the train and headed back to our apartment. After a quick stop off at a sukiya (a restaurant chain) for some take out curry donburi (basically a curry rice bowl) we finally arrived home at around 10:45pm making for a really long day.