Adventure 23/50 : Tokyo Disneyland

After a good night's sleep at the Nice Inn Mahaima Tokyo Bay, we hopped their shuttle and were dropped off at the gates. We put our stuff in a locker and quickly joined the queue. It was fun to compare the queuing behavior in Tokyo vs. Anaheim and Orlando... But the lines moved pretty quickly despite the crowds, and soon we were in.

I always love how each park has learned from its predecessors and adapted to its climate. Paris has the "quick exits" down the sides along "Main Street", and Tokyo has a big glass roof... perfect for those rainy days.

We didn't linger in the "World Bazaar" -- shopping could wait -- but moved toward the castle for the essential pic:

Then, of course, we made a beeline for one of the two most important rides of the day ... even if we would have preferred it in its natural state!

I was wearing my Haunted Mansion wallpaper tank, which the cute "servants" at the house recognized immediately and fussed over me. Bless. They also liked our classic wool ears, and pretended to ask if we would swap our clothes and ears for their cast member gear.

There was only the briefest wait and we were ushered into the entry. Sadly, we're not as familiar with the Haunted Mansion Holiday script to "follow along"... but once in the stretching room (oh, I wish we could have seen the standard version!!!) it was easy enough. Still, funny to hear Jack speak Japanese!

Portraits in the hallway...

Loading the doom buggies -- not as fancy here as in Anaheim:

Zero trimming the tree in the library:

Jack at the entrance to the graveyard, chatting up a storm:

The beautiful curling hill -- the best part of Haunted Mansion Holiday:

And some denizens of the graveyard, singing the holidazzled "Grim Grinning Ghosts" song:

We enjoyed it so much we went right around and rode it again, much to the delight of the cast members. 

We went from there deeper into Fantasyland to pick up fastpasses for Pooh's Hunny Hunt. We had been told that PHH is an "essential" ride at Tokyo Disneyland, so were curious about it. And then it was time to head to our other favorite ride:

The ride was pretty similar to Disneyland, even passing the Blue Bayou restaurant in the swamp ... though the banjo songs were different, the talking skull spoke Japanese, it lacked the creepy mermaid skeleton on the beach, and still had the women being auctioned off. Plenty of Jack Sparrow, though.

In all honesty, I'm not sure Jack was speaking English... though I think he was?

Key tasks fulfilled, we relaxed and wandered the park. What was funny was that it's very very similar to Disneyland ... but things are slightly in the "wrong: place, and distances are "wrong".

It's a Small World was very similar, but had a larger "Asia" section:

We went on a funny Jungle Cruise where -- even though we don't speak Japanese, we *still* got the jokes.

Don't forget Star Tours, all in Japanese, except in the intro video the droid switched to English and back again!

And then there was this... the Stitchified Enchanted Tiki Room...

The birds sang words and the flowers crooned... and Stitch played Elvis songs on his guitar... #notmytikiroom

But we loved how they had added little Halloween touches in the park: Pennants and elephant pumpkins at Dumbo:

The "Fab 5" in their costumes at the hub:

BTW, Daisy has NEVER looked so glam!

Adorable spiderwebbed Mickey balloons. I always kinda want one of these balloons, but I REALLY wanted one of these:

Again, there were lots of people in coordinated outfits:

and full-blown princess costumes:

Finally it was time for our fastpasses on Pooh's Hunny Hunt. It was a more secure version of fastpasses than in Anaheim -- you had to show the "reminder" ticket, which wasn't actually a fastpass, to go in the special entrance. And then you had to scan your park pass, which actually contained the "fastpass". That meant you couldn't get fastpasses and give them to someone else, which we often have done in the past when we were going to leave the park before the time came up.

Anyway, the queue area for PHH was cute, but we moved through it quite quickly. The ride cars were little hunny pots connected in sets of three; each one able to hold up to 6 people in 2 rows. The ride itself wasn't all *that* different -- the same stories, obviously -- but the behavior of the vehicles did. As we approached each scene, the little "trains" split into the three parts so everyone had a face-on view of the scene and could watch it unfold, and then the trains rejoined. At one scene the hunnypots and the background all "bounced" (no points for guessing who the scene portrayed!); in the "heffalumps and woozles" area all the pots swirled around separately, intermingling with other trains. Pretty great stuff.

Oh, and the gift shop... we did a lot of shopping... but I'm most in love with this Winnie rice spoon...

The day was really hot -- over 100 degrees F and very humid. And yet this was happening all day:

See all those people sitting around the edge of the hub? They're waiting for the parade. That won't start for over 2 hours. The worst part is that 15 minutes before the morning parade, an announcement said that the parade was cancelled "due to high temperatures". I'm guessing there was simply no way to keep the characters cool in their costumes...

By the mid afternoon we had ridden all the rides we wanted to ride, done quite a bit of shopping, and loads of people watching. So we decided to head home. It was a weird decision for us -- we tend to stay as late as we can -- but it was hot, we were tired, and we had squeezed in a lot of fun in 6 hours.