Sayonara, Tokyo!

We just spent the past few days in Disney, ahem, Tokyo, and now we’re on our way, via “bullet train,” to Kyoto.

Truth be told, we decided long before we left home that we’d spend the Tokyo leg of our journey largely at Disney. We wanted to see Tokyo Disney, but we also wanted to be able to move at a pace our children could tolerate. We decided we’d take our time for a few days, enjoying our resort and the Tokyo Disney complex, then switch gears for Kyoto. We will come back to Tokyo some day, I can just about promise, and see the city sights.

So… Tokyo Disneyland, as far as I can tell, is a replica of the Disneyland in California. With all spoken language in Japanese (written language in both English and Japanese). We quickly decided to move on to Tokyo DisneySea, and believe me, that place was awesome. I could write and write and write about it, but I’ll spare you! We really enjoyed it, and we totally exhausted our kids. We recovered at the hotel yesterday- doing laundry, swimming at the pool, playing at the massive indoor kids’ park, napping (Asher), and prepping for today.

One thing about Tokyo Disney- the popcorn. Is this going on in the States? People (like, every. single. person. there.) purchase these plastic buckets, in multiple different designs (gotta love Disney’s evil genius marketing!), that hang from straps around the neck, off the stroller, attached to a backpack, etc. Then, stations are located all throughout the parks for refills in all different flavors. Butter, kettle corn, and caramel corn, obviously. But how about milk tea, strawberry, curry, and soy sauce popcorn? Yep. We righteously resisted this phenomenon for all of maybe 2 hours. When we realized one of our vacation vouchers was for a FREE popcorn bucket, we were all over that. Aside from eating popcorn all day for 3 days straight, Isla and Asher also enjoyed throwing popcorn over the balcony of our hotel room, shoving popcorn into each others’ mouths (video on the way), and re-using our bucket to hold markers and crayons.