Sunday, December 5, 2010

Tokyo Disney :)

It's been a few weeks since I went to Disneyland, but all the same, wanted to write a little something about it.

We left our Hostel around 7:30 seeing as we wanted to get to the park for when it opened to hopefully avoid any long lines. We arrived at the park about 20 minutes before it opened, but our hopes of there not being very many people there were crushed as soon as we got in view of the park. There were more people crowded around the entrance than I'd ever seen in one place before.
We had a friend meeting us at the park and quickly tried to find her amongst the hordes of people. After we did, we got in one of the 24 lines that had formed to enter the park. When we finally got to the front of the line we were disappointed to see that we had been waiting in a line to enter the park, not to exchange our online ticket for a real one. Who knew? We nicely asked the people in line next to us (the line we should have been in) if we could switch over, and they nicely let us in. When we finally did get into the park we wanted to take some pictures with some of the Disney cast, but found huge lines had already formed to get photos. Seemed like waiting in line would become the theme of the day...
We decided not to waste our time and headed inside. Near the front we took turns taking pictures with Mr. Walt Disney himself (seemingly no one else had noticed the statue so there wasn't a line for this XD)
Because we had been so rushed to get to the park on time, we had neglected to get anything for breakfast. We decided to stop at the first place we saw to eat, which turned out to be a hot dog restaurant. Their slogan was "Best in Town. You'll love our wieners. Wrapped in a Bun. They're big on taste and large on fun!" We all had a nice laugh at this. The wieners were surprisingly tasty I must say. After "breakfast" we made our way over to The Pirates of the Caribbean ride. It was certainly not what I had expected, but fun all the same.
On our way to the next ride, we stopped by a booth to buy some funny hats for the day. Figured if we were at Disneyland, mind as well dress the part too.
As the day moved on, more and more people filled the park. We decided we'd need to make a plan if we wanted to see all the attractions. We set out to get a fast pass ticket for Big Thunder Mountain and then headed for the long line to Splash Mountain. And boy was the line ever long. I believe we must have waited for almost an hour and half. The long wait was worth it though, as the ride was quite enjoyable. Got pretty wet though, as someone (Taylor) had told me people sitting in the front wouldn't get as wet. Ah well:P Another group of friends we were planning on meeting had arrived at the park while we were in line, and we met up with them on our way to Big Thunder Mountain. Thanks to our fast pass, we were able to skip to long line for this ride, and pretty much walked right onto it.

We took some time after this ride to walk around a just enjoy the park. |We eventually made our way to Space Mountain and picked up a fast pass ticket. To our surprise our timeslot wasn't for another 5 hours, so we decided to kill time waiting in another line for Haunted Mansion.
We stopped off in the Queen of Hearts dining hall for a late lunch/early dinner. Their entire menu was that of western style meals, and I had a bacon salad, chicken breast with trimmings and a piece of pie. Very Yummy!
We did some shopping after dinner, took tons more pictures and continued to explore the park. We found ourselves back at the entrance and split off into to a few different groups planning to reconvene for the parade in an hour or so. I went with Taylor into a Penny Arcade were we played numerous hilarious old school arcade games. When we left the shop, we saw someone playing the music on a portable piano. He was extremely hilarious!



To finish off the wonderful day we were treated with a lovely parade celebrating all the Disney characters throughout the years. It was an amazing performance. On our way home, we were not at all too tired to recap all the fun parts of the day to each other, and had a great subway ride home recounting the great day.