Day 2- 3/6/11: Tokyo Disneyland

Please note, this will be another long post. Please scroll down for my crafty pre-scheduled post.

• Started the day bright and early... 1:30am, then again at 4:00am.. yes, still on Hawaii time. We were hungry from skipping dinner, so we went to find a 24 hr. grocery store and bought some snacks to tied us over till the hotel's breakfast. Sorry, forgot to take a photo, but their breakfast is so ono! Musubi, miso soup (good kine), salad, bread, coffee/tea... for free! Paul loaded up on so much food, he was all good for the rest of the morning.
• After breakfast, we headed out to Tokyo Disneyland... Woo Hoo! I couldn't wait! Of course, it took three transfers to get there, but it was much faster than driving to Kona! Paul is getting to be an expert on the JR line/Train.
• So we finally get in the park and end up going to the Monster's Inc. ride first. I heard it was different from the LA Disneyland version, so I knew this was one ride we had to go on. What I didn't think was that it would be so darn crowded!!! Why did we choose Sunday again? I also fell for the.. it doesn't look like such a long line, we don't need a fast pass! I think DH wanted to kill me. Anyway, after a very long wait, we finally got on the ride and it was fun, but very short and I don't know if it was worth a 2 hour wait. Definitely worth it for fastpass.
• So, while we were in line... everyone had these little buckets full of popcorn. Some kids brought them into the park empty. I had read on mouseplanet that they had a lot of flavored popcorn throughout the park and forgot about it until I saw everyone with the buckets. After the Monster's ride, we headed straight for the nearest popcorn stand and got a caramel corn. This was the best caramel corn ever! Not heavy syrupy like cracker jack. We decided to get the bucket like everyone else since you could refill it for 500 yen . After the caramel corn, we tried the soy sauce and butter, honey, and chocolate. The only ones we didn't try was regular salt and curry. I think my favorite was the soy sauce and butter. It was something like arare. Yummy! The bucket we got it in was a Monster's theme, but kids had different themed buckets, depending on where you got your popcorn from. I hope Tokyo Seas has these flavored popcorn too so I can get more tomorrow!

• So after Monsters and getting a snack, I tried to get some fastpasses for Winnie the Pooh's Hunny Hunt. I heard about this ride too and wanted to see it. Apparently, so did the rest of Tokyo and all of the fastpasses were used up for that day. Guess if you want to ride on this ride, you need to go get your fast pass early. So we decided to wait in yet another long line.. I think it was about 2 hours too, but felt like 4 since I had to use the bathroom about 1/2 way. DH urged me to do what the Japanese do and get out of line and cut your way back in. I just couldn't bring myself to do that and held it in. I must say that this ride was worth the wait. It was much cuter than the LA version. Though, the weird thing was hearing the characters in Japanese instead of English.
• After that, we watched a parade and headed for Small World to see what the Japanese version was like. Kinda cute hearing them sing in Japanese. They also expanded the Japan section of the ride, which was cool.
• After that, we checked out Disney's Philharmonic, but the line was just too long, and I couldn't bear to wait another 2 hours, so we decided to do a little shopping and find some food. We tried on some hats since that's always fun... Grandma Kat likes Mike, so we thought we'd get her one of these... just kidding Grandma! hee hee.

Everyone in Japan really likes Stitch... So I jumped on the Stitch bandwagon too! OK- here's one of the few photos we got of us together. A nice cast member was in front of the castle taking photos of everyone using their cameras. No photopass like in LA. Everyone was doing the peace sign, so we decided to do shaka. I just thought this was really cool. If it wasn't fragile, I would've bought it. Finally, I made DH watch the Electric Parade with me. Before settling in to our seats, we decided to go look for that chocolate flavored popcorn. While on this quest, we got sidetracked and found Pirates of the Caribbean, which didn't look very long, so we chanced it and got to get on in less than 20 min. Yay! After we got off the ride, we got our chocolate popcorn and a drink and headed for the parade route. I was happy to be able to see this parade again since teh last time I saw it was some time ago... I felt like I was a child again after hearing that familiar music. Since the fireworks was supposed to be 1/2 hour after the parade, we decided to stay for a bit to see what their fireworks was like... but after a couple minutes in, we decided to try to beat the rush to the train station since it wasn't a themed fireworks like the LA version. It was kinda weird cause after the parade, everyone got up and left and no one seemed interested in the fireworks at all. I guess they knew better than we did. Here's our last photo of the night using the long arm technique. Even though we had to stay in long lines today, it was a fun experience and I'm glad we went! Wow another long day.. gotta go sleep already so we can head to Tokyo Seas tomorrow. Ja Mata!