I’m going to summarize my time at Tokyo Disney’s other park DisneySea using guest thoughts from the classic Rollercoaster Tycoon game from the 90s:
“It’s too crowded here.”
“I’m lost!”
“I can’t find Fantasy Springs.”
“I’m tired.”
“I’ve spent all my money.”
“I want to go home.”
Considering we got to Disneyland at 7:30 and were able to ride several of the rides with reasonable wait times, I assumed that since it was Monday, there would be fewer people going to DisneySea. We took the hotel shuttle at 8am and arrived 15 minutes later…I was SO wrong about the guest attendance. I would say there were probably double the amount of people waiting to get into the park than yesterday.
I was so tired from doing Disneyland that I didn’t do any prior research for DisneySea. Unfortunately, there was a big learning curve and this park was much different. There is a new area of the park called Fantasy land at the very back which only allows for mobile queuing. Our top priority was to get on the Tangled ride so once we got through the entrance, I booked the $13 tickets for the ride. The earliest time I could book was in 2 hours so 11am.
We spent the morning wandering the park getting to know the area. I will say, after going to the Star Wars park Galaxy’s Edge in Orlando a few months ago, the detail and sheer size of Fantasy Springs is wayyy more impressive.
The Tangled ride was very similar to the Beauty and Beast ride from yesterday. You sit in the ride and it takes you through major scenes of the movie.
Overall the ride was really beautiful and it’s still impressive that they were able to pluck the characters from the movie and make them real life. I’m glad I had my telephoto lens for my camera to grab a closeup of Rapunzel singing in her tower. Joanna said the ride was so beautiful she teared up during the lantern scene. It did feel really short at 5 minutes in length though compared to Beauty and the Beast’s 8 min. Als the B&B ride had pre show scenes while you were making your way into the ride which made the experience feel longer whereas the Tangled ride did not.
The Peter Pan and Frozen rides in Fantasy Springs were fully booked and no additional spots were available for booking on the mobile app. I tried refreshing the app the entire day to no avail. There was an Indiana Jones ride and a few other thrill rides I was interested in going on but they were consistently between 2-3 hours of a wait through the whole time we were at the park.
The food options at this park were quite good too.
In order of eating appearance:
- Kiwi soda was very tasty, it included a giant Lucky Charms marshmallow bit on top
- Smoked chicken leg was so juicy and tender, nice flavor, and the meat fell off the bone
- Fried shrimp sandwich was tasty, similar to the one we got yesterday in Donald’s severed foot steamed bun
- This berry tart was disappointing, cold, flabby, kind of reminded me of a day old dutch baby
- Joanna really liked the sea salt ice cream sandwich with raspberry filling
- The iced latte had coffee jelly and boba in it, was refreshing and the caffeine sorely needed in the mid afternoon when jet lag started to kick in
I’m kind of a grump when it comes to theme park souvenirs because I’m cheap and the novelty wears off the moment you leave the park. So I let Joanna take all the pictures she wanted of the hats she liked.
As I was standing around I actually found a crowd predictor website that will let you know about how busy to expect the theme parks to be if you’re planning on going: Link
I would say anecdotally for both days, this was pretty accurate. If you’re planning a future trip definitely bookmark this as a reference.
It got to be about 4pm, my feet were getting tired, and I was exhausted from bumping into people and failing to get into the virtual lines for rides. A few months ago, someone on Reddit posted a tip of a free observatory you can visit to get some really nice views of Tokyo which was in our part of town. I asked Joanna if we could go as we would be able to arrive before sunset. It was so worth the visit because I got a great timelapse and some nice photos out of it.
You can’t exactly see Mt. Fuji in the timelapse taken with my phone, but holy cow my camera was able to catch it on the telephoto lens. This first photo will probably be one of my favorite pics taken from this trip. The security guard patrolling the observation deck saw I had a tripod sticking out of my backpack and was on me the moment I tried pulling it out saying tripods are not allowed except for the 3rd Friday and Saturday of the month. Had to make due with this selfie of us and awkwardly balancing my camera on the edge of a bench to get these long exposure shots.
It started getting cold up on the 45th floor of the observatory deck so we went to find some dinner. Got a nice dipping soba noodle dinner with vegetable and shrimp tempura for $12 each.
We are leaving Tokyo tomorrow to head to our overnight ferry about an hour and a half south where we are going to Kyushu for a little over a week. Not sure what we have planned as boarding the ship is at 11pm, might go to Yokohama for the day as we haven’t been there before.
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