Main highlights:
- Tokyo Disneyland
Q: Many people may be wondering, “If I have a tight itinerary, which should I visit? Tokyo Disneyland or Disneysea?”
A: I think it depends on what you expect to see. If you like cute stuffs, and want more fun rides to play, I would think Disneyland is more fun, although there are a few far more thrilling and scarier rides (like Raging Spirits, Tower of Terror and Journey to the Center of the Earth) at Disneysea. So Disneysea is more for those bravehearts. Disneyland’s Splash Mountain, Big Thunder Mountain and Space Mountain pale in comparison in terms of scary-ness. Generally, I find Disneysea’s rides very boring and nothing makes me really look forward to playing again, except Journey to the Center of the Earth. At Disneyland, I am always repeatedly playing the same few rides – Peter Pan’s Flight, Pooh’s Hunny Hunt and Buzz Lightyear’s Astro Blasters but I enjoy those 3 rides very much still. When it comes to night time, I would think Disneysea’s night view is more awesome and worth catching, although Disneyland has a beautiful Cinderella castle that lights up every night. Disneyland has a Electrical Dreamlights Parade, which consists of various Disney characters in very bling bling floats moving round the Cinderella castle, while Disneysea’s BraviSEAmo! is very spectacular and something you won’t commonly see in Singapore. I am not sure if our musical fountain at Sentosa is as good or even better, but I like the BraviSEAmo!’s rythms and movements of the fire and water. Not forgetting the catchy Disney type of music during the performance. However, Disneyland’s food is DEFINITELY better than in Disneysea. There are pizza spring rolls, smoked turkey legs and Mickey waffles/pancakes and desserts which cannot be found in Disneysea. 🙂 Well, saying so much, I think I have strong reasons to like both parks, so each time that I go Tokyo, I will make sure I allocate 2 full days for both parks. (Last year, we nearly wanted to give Disneysea a miss, but fortunately we didn’t or I would have regretted missing BraviSEAmo!. Hahaha. Instead, we went shopping in the morning and entered the park around noon time, which meant we missed many rides there.)
Similar to the previous day’s arrangement for Disneysea, we had to board the shuttle bus from our hotel to Tokyo Disneyland. We reached the park super early, at around 7 am, when Disneyland was supposed to open at 8.30 am that morning. At 7 am, as usual, the outside of the park looked very quiet.
If you walk inwards, where the gantry gates are, you will be surprised (or maybe not) that it is already pretty packed! Do note the photo below was taken at 7.05 am in the morning, about 1.5 hour before the park opened.
That morning was drizzling a little, and hence both of us chose the sheltered area to queue up to enter Disneyland, even though other queues were slightly shorter. Top left hand corner shows the queue that we were in.. About 20 people in front of us.
Those people queueing outdoors were crazy, some of them did not even have umbrellas and braced the rain while waiting for 1 hour +.
It was also during that morning that we saw some ugly behaviour by a Japanese woman holding the hands of her two young boys. She was cutting the queue of the two girls behind us. Those two girls were obviously unhappy about it and stuck very close to our behind so that they couldn’t squeeze in when the gantry gates open. During our previous trips to Tokyo, we used to hold the impression that majority of Japanese were very nice and conscientious people, but this trip made us notice many black sheep among there. For instance, we used to think that whenever we were taking pictures, like Yh taking a picture of me and vice versa, they will not walk through the front of the camera and intercept our picture-taking. Usually, they would walk a longer route behind the person holding the camera. This time, we noticed so many rude Japanese cutting into our paths and ruining so many of our pictures. It was not like that during our previous trips. Sigh… It didn’t just happen once or twice, but many times. Was it because of the hot weather that made them reduce their “nice” factor? Hahaha. Or was it the economic downturn that made them more selfish and behave differently? There was indeed a change in them this year, and we could sense it.
While queueing up, I noticed the mother in front of me having a Disneyland passport ticket which had the character Boo on it. Ours was Mickey and Tinkerbell. Tsk tsk. I like Boo!!! So, I asked her politely if I could take a picture of her passport and she kindly obliged. 🙂
Boo on the top right hand corner. Hope I get her on my next Disneyland/sea passport!
By being rather early in the queues before the gates, we caught glimpses of many characters like Mickey and Pooh. Couldn’t get a good picture of Mickey from our videos as a Japanese guy lifted his daughter on his shoulders and blocked our videocam’s view. As you can see in the picture above, people are waving to the characters! My favourite Pooh was looking so round and cheerful as usual.
As it was drizzling that morning, the Disney characters did come out to wave to everyone before the park opened but they went into hiding once everyone rushed in. There was no photo-taking of Disney characters during rainy conditions! Tsk tsk.. We were targetting to have a photo taken with Minnie.
Quickly putting aside our disappointment, we channelled our energy towards the new attraction in Disneyland –> Monsters, Inc. Ride & Go Seek! (Newly opened in Apr 2009) The description on the website sounded pretty vague. It says something about boarding the tram and playing flashlight tag with Boo. I thought it was a similar concept like Buzz Lightyear’s Astro Blasters, the shooting game where you shoot various targets and earn points, just that this was probably using a torch to shine at Boo to earn points. I was wrong.
Anyway, the Japanese were crazier than us about that ride. Many of them were also first-timers like us, and they were actually RUNNING, SPRINTING, JUMPING, HOPPING, whatever, all the way to the fastpass ticketing booth of that ride! Once the park opened, almost EVERYONE was running towards the same direction, all cutting through World Bazaar, turning right at the cross-junction. Fortunately the pavements there are wide, or there would have been a stampede already. Some mothers were dragging their children along with them as they ran, as their children couldn’t run fast. Hahaha. I couldn’t beat the enthusiastic Japanese at running, so I told Yh to run first and I would meet him directly at the fastpass ticketing booth instead. When I reached the booth, he was already queueing up for it, and there were so many people before and after him. In the end, though he reached the ticketing booth at 8.35-8.40 am, our fastpass returning time was at 10.35 am. This meant that so many people before him had gotten fastpass tickets for the ride. Super competitive. Hahaha. Later on, we learnt that all the fastpasses for the ride had been given out by about 11+ am, and standby entrance’s waiting time was as long as 150 minutes to 180 minutes..
Mad rush for these — Fastpasses for Monsters, Inc. Ride & Go Seek! To prevent delays due to any guests not knowing how to obtain fastpasses, there was a staff stationed at every booth to help us insert in our passports and hand us our fastpasses.
After the rush, we slowed down our pace and started looking for nice cafes or restaurants nearby to have our breakfast. Previously we have had Mickey waffles at Great American Waffle Company and Mickey pancakes at Center Street Coffeehouse, so this time we wanted to try something different. We went to Sweetheart Cafe and instead of choosing the normal-looking breads and pastries for breakfast, we chose the desserts that had some Disney themes to them. Haha. Eating desserts in the early morning? It was a holiday, we just did whatever made us happy!
Two of us with our “breakfast”.
That pretty cup on the front left is coffee jelly with vanilla custard and the swiss roll on the right is Monsters, Inc. swiss roll. Look at its colours, all following closely to the colour theme of Monsters, Inc. The colours of the swiss roll were what drew me to buy it! As for the coffee jelly, I felt the strawberry heart shape on top was very pretty, it was actually just a cookie but I loved it! The total damage for that water, milk, and the 2 desserts came out to be 1380 yen. Not cheap but you can bring home the Monsters, Inc. plate beneath the swiss roll. Despite looking pretty, they tasted only average. Haha. Looked better than they tasted.
A closer look at the Monsters, Inc. swiss roll.
A closer look at the coffee jelly.
That’s my husband looking like he enjoyed the coffee jelly. Haha. I did not like it so I passed it to him to finish up for me. Hahaha. It looks funny seeing a man eating something so girly. He seemed happy eating it though. 🙂
Done with breakfast, we moved on to play and take pictures in the park. Enjoy the pictures.
Some photo-taking along the way to Fantasyland. Behind me was World Bazaar. My stomach still looked big here ‘cos I had not output for days. Haha.
That’s Cinderella’s Castle behind. It looks so small compared to my big head, as I was standing really far far far infront of it lah. Haha.
Many more photos of the castle below. Some taken at different angles and places. We simply liked its architecture. The previous previous round, it was still under renovation, and last year I don’t know why we didn’t take many photos of it too. Haha.
Notice the kawaii garden outside the castle? Is that a rainbow-shrub? Haha. (I mentioned in my posts last year that Tokyo Disneyland is full of interesting looking plants, in various shapes.) Even if you’d like to enter the garden outside Cinderella Castle, you can’t as it is out of bounds. All fenced up. 😦
Wah didn’t realise my face was so oily. It was hot that day too. Hope I blotted my face from then on so that other pictures won’t have the shine.. Haha.
Saving the other pictures and words for Part II onwards. Although Tokyo Disneyland is not as pretty as Disneysea, the cuteness of it still keeps me deeply attracted to it. Hahaha. I am a big child at heart.
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