Tokyo 2009 - Part 5

Tokyo, Day 7, Monday 19th October

Got up reasonably early and headed to Tokyo DisneySea (the second park of the Tokyo Disney Resort) for a day of Disney goodness.

Sharon had arranged to meet up with someone she had chatted to on micechat.com, a Disney discussion board, so after a bit of breakfast in the park and some shopping we went to the pre-arranged meeting point at the park entrance. The guy we met up with, Brian, is lucky enough to live in Tokyo and work as an ESL teacher, and so he has an annual pass to the Disney Resort and can go whenever he likes. He has slight obsession with Duffy, the Disney Bear. According to the official story, Duffy was made by Minnie Mouse as a present to Mickey. Brian escorted us to the shops in DisneySea that sell Duffy merchandise and Sharon bought her very own Duffy bear complete with its own halloween costume!

Brian couldn't spend too long with us so we bade him farewell and continued our wanders around the park, including a ride on "Aquatopia". We had a nice lunch in the Teddy Roosevelt Lounge on the S.S. Columbia, which is our favourite restaurant in DisneySea. After lunch and a bit more of a walk around the park we headed out of the park to the nearby shopping mall "Ikspiari" where we managed to find some amusing things to buy, before heading back into the park. We went on the rides "Tower of Terror" and "Journey to the Centre of the Earth" and then left the park, just before closing time (10pm).

Tokyo, Day 8, Tuesday 20th October

Spent the day in Tokyo Disneyland. They have a new ride, "Monsters Inc. Ride & Go Seek" at the park, and we wanted to go on this. E ven though we got to the park not too long after opening, there was a long wait (close to 2 hours) so we opted to get a "fastpass" which lets you avoid the line and come back later. Several hundred people had the same idea so we had to line up for about 20 minutes just to get the fastpass, and then our allocated return time was 6.05pm! After getting our fastpasses we went for a walk around the park and went on the "Holiday Haunted Mansion" ride (one of our favourites) , which itself required a fair amount of queuing. We then headed to Toontown for a while and then ended up near Cinderella's castle where we just sat for a few hours waiting for the Halloween parade - which was excellent. After the parade we left the park for a while to explore some of the Disney hotels before finally returning to the park for our allocated time on the Monsters Inc ride. It was OK but not necessarily worth all the wait :) After the ride we decided to leave Disneyland and ended up having some dinner at the Rainforest Cafe in Ikspiari.