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Asia » Japan » Tokyo » Chiyoda
February 18th 2010
Published: June 1st 2010
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My 4th Disney day of the trip! During last October when I was onboard the Disney Magic I went to a talk about the different theme parks that a lady from Disney Imagineering gave. She asked everybody in the audience who had been to which parks and had anybody been to all of them (nobody put their hands up for that), she went on to say that she had a friend who for her 25th birthday had visited every park round the world. That is Disneyland, California Adventure, Disneyland Paris, Disney Studios, Disneyland Hong Kong, Disneyland Tokyo, Tokyo Disney Sea, Magic Kingdom, Epcot, MGM, and Disney Animal Kingdom. I went away from that talk thinking oooo that is what I want to do for my 25th birthday. Well I will be 25 in just over 2 months (at the time of writing) and so far I have done 6 of them! Let’s hope I get to Disneyland California to do the 2 parks there, then I can do the 2 in Paris when I am back, and the remaining park I can do in September when I am in Walt Disney World.

Tokyo Disney Sea didn’t open till 10am so we didn’t need to be up ridiculously early, I had planned to get up at 8:30, but HB was awake by 8. HB has the inability to stay still or quiet while everyone is asleep. Not a problem when it is 8 that she is waking up, but when she is up 6:30 and I still have 2hrs before I get up then it becomes a little annoying. It isn’t that she makes a lot of noise by talking but she moves very loudly in her bed, I have told her 100s of times to please try to stay still as it isn’t fair to wake everyone else up. I have also told her if she does wake up just to get a book and read. That never works well either though, she seems to think she needs my permission to do that. Then when she has a book she starts out making up her story very quietly but it ends with wild dramatic voices and jumping up and down. It is very sweet so I don’t want to stop it, but I also like my sleep. As it was only half an hour before the alarm was going to go off I decided to get up and get ready.

The plan was that we were meeting Sinji in the lobby on the top floor at 9:30. When we got up there we couldn’t find Sinji, so we decided to have a look on the ground floor to see if he was there. Nope, not there. Hmmmm, in the end we phoned Mr and Mrs G to see if they could phone him to find out where he was. Turns out he was on the top floor. We must have gotten into the lift when he was coming out. Back up we went only to come back down. Then it was onto the parks.

We got a taxi to the park; I was in the middle between the two kids. Do you ever get the feeling of being tired of hearing too much? Just like Tigger in Winnie the Pooh and Tigger Too when he is sick from seeing too much. I had both of them talking at the same time asking questions, when I would turn to answer one of them the other would start asking their question. My head was ready to explode with hearing too much and not being able to think. Ahhhhh! The best way to avoid the situation - ooh what is that out the window and then get them to try and spot something that isn’t there. It worked, hurray, silence for a few moments. Fantastic.

It was great having Sinji with us this time as he could do all the talking and ordering for us. Sinji got the tickets for us and then as the park had already opened we headed right on it. Our first port of call was the information board to see what the wait times were. I found it rather nice that when the CMs (Cast Members) changed the times on the board they would make an announcement to the crowd, bow, change the wait time and then bow again. How polite they are. The wait time for Tower of Terror was 120 mins and 130 mins for Journey to Centre of the Earth. Both far too long to wait in, plus they were both rides that HB wouldn’t be riding. She might be tall enough but I am not mean enough to make her ride them. If I did that I could officially be classed
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What a giggle
as the world’s worst nanny. I know HB and she would totally freak out on them, I mean totally and utterly have a meltdown. Anyway off we went to Tower of Terror to see what the situation was for fastpasses (fps). The park had been open a grand total of 45 minutes and the fps for Tower of Terror were for a return time of 6pm! OMG! This is classified as the slow period, I would hate to see it in their peak periods. I don’t think the fps go that quickly in WDW during the middle of summer. We didn’t get them in the end as we had to be back for 5ish so there was no point. Oh well, another time. We then went off to find Journey to Centre of the Earth to hopefully get a fp. This time the return time was for 1:20-2:20, that we could do. Obviously not that many people had managed to get round to this part to get fps, or those that had had fp for Tower of Terror and so couldn’t get one for this ride yet.

We had now been in the park for 30 mins so it was about time to do a ride. As we were in whatever section we were in we decided to do the only other ride there - 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. I thought it would be like the one that used to be in WDW as they had a Nautilus sub in the lake below us and the line spiralled down to that level. Well I was wrong. The subs where on a train and took about 6 people per sub. They took us down to the City of Atlantis, because we all know that the City of Atlantis is in the middle of Tokyo! I am so glad that we found it; totally solved that mystery, but shhhh don’t tell anyone that it is there. I was sitting with HB in the side seats so we a) didn’t hear Sinji’s translation and b) didn’t really see what we were meant to see. The details were pretty incredible, but it isn’t one that I would rush back too.

On our way over to the centre of the park we had passed a ride called Aquatopia, I didn’t go on this one last time as I thought that it was probably like the Autotopia in the Disneyland parks where you get to drive a car around a track, although this one was on water. I also thought it would be a pretty lame ride. How wrong I was, it was brilliant ride. You went on these hover crafts that took you in all sorts of directions - backwards, forwards, sideways and spun you round. No two goes would be the same. It is a very ingenious ride, it detects when there is another craft and will send you in a different directions. HB and I had such a giggle over it, I mean we really laughed. Such a simple thing, but yet lots of fun.

The other ride in this area was a simulator called Stormrider. The basic concept of this ride is that someone has managed to create a device that when set off can stop storms. Obviously there is the biggest storm ever seen heading our way and we set off to test out this bomb. Well, things just don’t go as planned (how original) and somehow the other craft with us gets destroyed and the bomb is blown right though the roof of ours. With seconds left before detonation we managed to get the bomb out, but we are too close to the explosion and get hit by the shock waves. In the end we save the day and the storm disperses. YAY! HB did come on this ride with us. Mainly as we didn’t think it would be so violent and extreme. Was HB scared? No! I was more scared than she was. When the bomb came through the roof and pipes where flipping everywhere with steam and the such I thought she would scream, I, from one side, clamped my hands over her ears and F, from the other side, grabbed hold of her. The look she gave me was priceless, she looked at me like I was some sort of maniac, her eyes said ‘what are you doing?’ At the end I asked her what she thought and she said ah it was alright, I don’t know why you covered my ears though it wasn’t that loud. My conclusion. Firstly she is tougher than we give her credit; but secondly she didn’t understand what was going on. Everything was in Japanese so she couldn’t understand what was being said, and storyline was too complicated. As she didn’t understand it it didn’t frighten her. It is the same reason why she will go and put her hand into piles of rocks and leaves although there is likely to be a snake in it. She doesn’t understand the danger.

Now it was time for lunch, we headed to the closest restaurant, and by sheer chance this one had Mickey and the gang coming round. HB was really excited. She could hardly eat her food because she was that excited (reminds me of someone else I know). We had both Mickey and Minnie come round, but we didn’t bother staying for Pluto. HB was a little sad, but we explained that we were sure that we would see him around elsewhere. She was happy with that, even though we didn’t see him again.

Our fp for Journey to the Centre of the Earth had now opened up so off we went to that. We had a fp for HB as well, not so that she could ride it but so that she could stick it in her diary. Even if she had wanted to ride it she couldn’t. She was far too small to ride it. So I waited with HB while Sinji and F went on. Then when they were done I went on with F while Sinji stayed with HB. In the end we didn’t bother using her fp as they did it as a child swap so we didn’t wait the 15mins that the fp line was at. It really was amazing. The first part is all about travelling down into the centre of the earth and what you see - fields of strange plants, then suddenly you get attacked by a giant centipede and there is fire and zoom, you are off. You go up really quickly, the dip down is so sudden that you can’t actually see it, it seems as if you will go straight off the end of the track. It was really great. F, being the lovely pre-teen that he is put me on the inside so that I was closest to the fire and such. He laughed himself silly when I screamed, the people behind me also laughed.

When we got back Sinji had bought us each these hand warmers - they were greatly needed and appreciated. He was really kind that way, each night when we got back to our hotel we would have a knock on the door and he would have sent up a cake or something similar for us all! At great expense as well. He really went out of his way for us. I miss him as a guide; he was one of the best we had.

By now it was 2:30 and high time that we did a few things for HB, she had been such a patient girl about doing all these “bigger” rides, so we split up. The boys went off to do a roller coaster and we went to Mermaid Lagoon to find some smaller rides. On the way in we chanced to meet Prince Eric! Never seen him before so it was great to see him. He was very handsome and charming. HB lost all ability to talk - she always does. He asked if we had seen Ariel, which we answered not yet, but we were on our way there. So he asked us to ask her what she wanted for dinner. With this mission in hand we went off to find her. She was the exact same one I had seen
RuinsRuinsRuins

This was the roller coaster that F queued up for 2hrs to ride.
the other day when I was here by myself. When HB asked the question, actually it was a case of trying to get HB to ask her but I ended up doing it in the end, Ariel had a good think and said Seaweed Salad, but Prince Eric doesn’t like that so much so she said popcorn too! Popcorn? That isn’t dinner. Oh well, I guess when you are a Princess you can have what you like. We did try to find Eric but he wasn’t out anymore.

HB wanted to ride the mini fish roller coaster - that’s my girl, and then we headed inside into Triton’s Kingdom. We had enough time to do the Jumpin Jellyfish and the Blowfish Swings (which made me feel rather sick - curses to the spinning rides) before going into the Arabian Coast to do the Carrousel. I hadn’t managed to get into this part before so it was a first for the both of us. It was rather nice, and actually a lot like Morocco. We went up stairs on the Carrousel and rode a Griffin and an Elephant, which was a nice twist from the normal horses. HB wanted to
Flounders CoasterFlounders CoasterFlounders Coaster

We waited 10 mins for this one
ride again but our meeting time was fast approaching so we needed to hot foot it over to the entrance to meet the boys. Who typically were late. Their excuse? They had queued for the last 2 hours to do a 90 second roller coaster that they didn’t really like. HA! They should have chosen to do the Tower of Terror. F turned up with a bag of pepper popcorn! It was strange but moorish. They have the oddest flavours of popcorn including strawberry (which is nice), curry and honey!

For now it was good bye to Tokyo Disneyland Resort and back to the real world again *sigh*. We did have a lovely sunset to see us off. I had such a wonderful day here, but I will stand by what I said before; they may win the prize for details but they lack the magic.

Back at the hotel it was time to pack up and get ready for a day of travelling to Bali. Mrs G had done all the children’s packing, including taking things out of their normal suitcase and putting it into the cold country case which was being sent back to Germany. It
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Very nice
was here that she managed to put in one of F’s t-shirts without realising and then blamed me for losing it in a hotel laundry somewhere. I knew I hadn’t. I take great care in making sure all the things are back when I put them in the wash. Never mind, I found it again when we got back to Germany.

So that is the end of the Japanese part of our trip. Time to sum up. Did I like the country? Yes, the best so far. Would I go back? Yes, once I have saved enough money to afford to go back, there is so much of the country that I would love to explore and see, including Tokyo as I didn’t actually see anything in Tokyo apart from Disney. Oh well, saving it for when I can do it on my own time, without children.
To be continued...




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