Japan Trip, Day 16

After a long trip of being immersed in a foreign culture, we decided we needed a huge blast of American-ness. What to do? Head to your nearest Disneyland. Yes, we spent the day at Tokyo Disneyland.

Not much to say, except it was Disney. In a surreal sort of way. The rides were identical to the ones back in the US, but the announcements and scripts were all in Japanese. We just did what everyone else did, and got along fine. One rule in the park was that tattoos must be covered. Different from our Disney that has fake tattoos for sale.

Food was still a problem. The pizzas all had meat. No mac-n-cheese. But there were 14 types of popcorn to choose from, ranging from honey to curry.

Chloe fell in love with roller coasters. She loved Splash Mountain and Thunder Mountain and was sad to learn that Space Mountain was closed. Camille insisted that we watch the electric lights parade, and we are glad that we did! It was fun to see all the kids go wild at the parade.

The bouncy house had rules like “Don’t Bump into other people.” and “Apologize if you do accidentally bump into someone.”

The JR train runs right to Disney, making it easy to get there and get back to the apartment. On the trains, everyone opens up their phones and does something. What, I don’t know. They don’t talk on them — there are signs and announcements telling people to put their phone on “quiet mode” and to not talk on them so as to not disturb the people around them. As technology focused as Japan is, I expected there to be more iPods. We saw very few earbuds until we got to Tokyo, and there still aren’t many. No one used laptops on the long train rides.