#TBT April 2005: Tokyo Disneyland, Day 2!

by SharonKurheg

MODERN-DAY NOTE: When I originally wrote this entry for my personal blog in 2005, I didn’t include pictures. I have no idea why, short of how much time it took to do so. I’ll include a few in the course of the post but most will be towards the bottom. Please enjoy!

Today was a “take it easy” day. We didn’t even wake up until 9:30am (almost a normal hour!).

Before we went to the park, Joe and I sent some of our luggage on to our next hotel so we wouldn’t have to lug it as much (Japan has this beautiful system where you can ship packages and suitcases to, from and between hotels for only about $20 per suitcase…with sometimes just 2 days here and 3 days there, it made things SO much easier!). Then we met up with Steve at Disneyland.

The first business of the day was food and we decided to go to Blue Bayou, which was in New Orleans square. The restaurant looks exactly the same as DL’s in CA, complete with the far edge overlooking the beginning of POTC. The food was AWESOME…some of the best we’ve had in TDLR (in fact, the best we’ve had at a Blue Bayou…and the 3 of us have now been to all 3), and they even had free refills on the drinks! (we’ve come to learn that refills, let alone free ones, are not the norm in Japan)

Our next course of action was, of course, to hit the rides.
– Pirates of the Caribbean for the 3rd time (by the way, the men still chase the women in this one and the ladies are NOT carrying any food!)
-Tiki Birds (totally different show from both of the US versions…apparently the same premise (I guess…it’s all in Japanese), but doesn’t get a crowd of more than 50 people.
-Swiss Family Robinson Treehouse (exact same as WDW’s, I guess? I haven’t gone on it in years)
-Western River Railroad (TDL version of the WDW/DL Railroad…narration in Japanese, it goes in a figure eight and only had one stop, at Westernland (remember…if it had more than 1 stop, it would be transportation and they’d have to charge extra for it)…nice views of the park and it has the dinosaur diorama that DL has)
-Tom Sawyer Island (VERY cool…they have Injun Joe’s cave, Fort Sam Clemens [where they sell vanilla, chocolate or caramel milkshakes] a teeter totter rock, a spinning rock, all of the cool bridges, lots of stuff that WDW doesn’t)
-Country Bear Jamboree (same as WDW’s and half in Japanese, half in English…the exit area is the same as what DL’s looked like…when DL had a CBJ)
-Big Thunder Mountain Railroad (track is nothing like WDW’s, don’t remember what DL’s is like, but this one is COOL, with different outside scenes, bats in one of the caves, etc.)
-Mark Twain Riverboat (seems to be the same as ours, with Japanese narration. One thing I noticed in the Japanese version that is different from the US versions…when you go past deer or any other 4-legged audioanimatronic animal, you can see that when they wag their tails, they actually have butt holes painted in the appropriate places )
-Roger Rabbit’s Toontown Spin (fun ride…don’t remember DL’s version to make a comparison)
-Grand Circuit Raceway (I guess the Japanese don’t know what the Grand Prix is) (half of the cars have steering wheels on the left, like real Japanese cars [they also drive on the left side of the street]. They also have sensors built in so you can’t hit the car in front of you)
-Star Tours (I sat this one out…this 39y/o body can’t do simulators like it used to [modern-day note: this 51y/o body? Even less so]…but the guys said it was exactly the same as ours. Entry queue and exit were different though)
-Dreamlights (for the 2nd time. What a good parade!)
-Jungle Cruise (just like at home, it’s a little “looser” at night time…the guide, we are POSITIVE, said something to the effect that we were Americans and had no idea what the ride was about (yeahRIGHT), but also spoke a few words of Engrish for us…”Oh, is erephent!”, made fun of the guest in the boat who was wearing Minnie ears…”Minnie-san,” etc.)
-Pooh’s Honey Hunt (for the 3rd time…hey, it was a walk-on at 9:45pm…the CM even let us each have our own car)
-Buzz Lightyear’s Astro Blasters (two times in a row, to close the park at 10pm)

The popcorn carts at TDL and TDS look the same as ours, but you’ll be hard-pressed to find “normal” popcorn. They have curry popcorn, sea salt popcorn, strawberry popcorn, caramel popcorn, soda popcorn (???), cappuccino popcorn, honey popcorn…all kinds of weird flavors. I tried the honey popcorn…it was AWESOME!

Joe and I also at ate at a buffeteria called the Queen of Hearts Banquet Hall, that was themed after Alice in Wonderland…it was VERY well-done, and one of the desserts was a 6″ Unbirthday Cake!)

Once the park was closed, we went to the Bella Vista Lounge, which was part of a restaurant at our hotel. Very good food…VERY expensive!

Just for the hell of it, we looked for the hotel pool (the use of which you had to pay for) and found it, after going up one elevator and down another. They really hid it well! Unfortunately, the pool closed at 8pm, so the door was locked. Probably the one part of the hotel we never saw. Ah well…

Tired as we were, we started to get stuff packed, since we were checking out in the morning. Finally got to bed around midnight, with a 7:30am alarm.

More next time…

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