Day 2: DisneySea

Today we are visiting DisneySea, a unique theme park unlike the other Disney theme parks around the world. Walt Disney originally envisioned a nautical counterpart to Disneyland, but it was never built in his lifetime due to problems with Euro Disney.

According to Wikipedia:

Tokyo DisneySea (東京ディズニーシー) is a theme park at the Tokyo Disney Resort located in Urayasu, Chiba Prefecture, Japan, just outside Tokyo. It opened on 4 September 2001, at a cost of 335 billion yen. The Oriental Land Company owns the park, and licenses Disney characters and themes from The Walt Disney Company. With a size of 176-acre (71.22 ha), Tokyo DisneySea attracted nearly fifteen million visitors in 2018, making it the fourth-most-visited theme park in the world.

Wikipedia

The official website is available in English.

Journey

We woke up and had breakfast at the hotel. We have stayed in many “business class” hotels in Japan 9 years ago and know that the quality and variety of what is offered for breakfast can range from basic to amazing. On this scale, the breakfast was at least 8 out of 10. I had a selection of Japanese dishes including my favourite chawan mushi but they even had kare (curry). They also had a full range of Western dishes – I tried the bacon and sausages and they were both delicious. Since I knew I will be skipping lunch I had extra large helpings. The coffee was from a machine and was okay. By the time I finished, I was waddling out with a full belly.

The journey there involved changing across three sets of trains plus a short walk between stations. Once again Apple Maps proved to be very useful. It knew all the underground connections and even gave us a shortcut not officially signposted. We were lucky enough to catch a Rapid train which halved the journey time to the Disney Resort Gateway. After that we boarded the Disney line which featured cute Mickey Mouse shaped windows (like the similar train in Hong Kong).

Afterwards

We finished around 6pm and didn’t want to stay for the night show and fireworks. We were ravenous by that time but the food in the resort was at rip off expensive prices. What is worse is when we left, they force us to go through floors of shops just so that they can have one final chance to rip us from our money. We finally reached the JR Maihama station with vending machines that sold drinks at normal prices!

We waited around 15 mins for an express train (local slow trains were every few mins) and it was worth it – the journey took less than 20 mins to get to Tokyo station. On the way back we experienced the subway at peak hour. Wow it’s true they do pack people in like sardines! We could barely squeeze into the train but luckily the platform attendant didn’t have to push people in.

For dinner, we were tempted to eat at Tokyo station but decided to head back to Asakusa for an unagi meal. We were in a very small and homely restaurant but the owners were very nice – I felt like I was back in time to a 60s Japanese movie.