And now for something completely different...: Japan - Day 12

We had to be up early, again, for another buffet breakfast.

The kids were even harder to get up.

Twinkle toes.

Probably dreaming about more walking....

Katie was comfi in her alcove bed.

Out our window, the fountains were back on this morning.

As we waited for our reservation at the buffet, this happened.

Hmmmm.

Maybe the kids were trying to tell us something?

Katie, once again, wasn't enthused to eat the same old, same old.

So, she just ate a tiny bit of something.

The rest of us pigged out on various things.

I tried a Goofy melon pan and a Dale shaped pastry with a macadamia nose.

It was really, really raining as we left the hotel to get in line for the "Happy 15!" entry.

This time, we were early and were able to take advantage of our extra 15 minutes!

Thank you, World Showcase, for your rain-proof roof.

A little bit of atmosphere.....

We trucked it over to "Monsters Inc. Ride and Go Seek!"

This is THE hotness in Tokyo Disneyland.

This ride ALWAYS has a line.

Which kid had breakfast?

Can you tell?

In the ride, humans are invited to the Monsters Inc. factory (remember, they extract laughs now) for a game of Flashlight Tag. Boo is invited too.

The monsters don't know that Randall is back and is trying to kidnap Boo for her scream.

The ride is similar to Buzz Lightyear Astro Blasters (or Space Ranger Spin, for you East Coasters). You are in a vehicle and use your flashlight to shine on the "M" symbols you see. The symbols light up and then something silly happens or a monster appears. It's really fun. I wish we could've rode it again.

I missed getting a picture of Huzbend and Mikey in their vehicle.

Our next ride was "Space Mountain".

We decided to use fastpasses.

We gave them to a cast member who took them and waved us by.

The next set of cast members we encountered hadn't seen us hand over the passes and thought we were just walking into the wrong line and they stopped us.

I had to tell them to, "Hold on a second, sorry" ("Chotto matte, sumimasen") and find the original lady that had our passes. The second set of cast members then seemed to chew out the first cast member, but we were allowed to go in.

That was the one and only time that we encountered a little bit of annoyance from others with our lack of Japanese language skill.

There's a neat little magic-carpet escalator to get up into the inside queue of the ride.

Still super rainy.

Tokyo Disneyland's "Space Mountain" is very similar to California Disneyland's version.

Far superior to WDW's.

We used another of our fastpasses for "Pooh's Hunny Hunt".

This Pooh ride features a trackless ride system that gives it bit more randomness and fun.

The honeypots that you ride in bounce with Tigger when he jumps and spin and dance with the Heffalumps.

Check it out here:

It was STILL raining pretty hard when we stepped out of Pooh's.

Time to hit up some inside attractions to try and keep our feet dry.

"Mickey's Philharmagic" was first up.

They have this same thing in WDW, but in English.

Next, we ran to the Castle to experience a walk through attraction.

"Cinderella's Fairy Tale Hall."

You can take an elevator up to the second (or maybe third?) floor of the castle and walk through a hallway that has different artistic representations of scenes from Cinderella.

Can you see how empty the park is?

Blissful, yet soggy.

Each scene is a different art type. There was paper folding, drawings, metal sculptures, and clay models.

At the end of the walk through, there were photo ops.

The biggest draw was sitting on a throne that had magical lights and sounds.

Mikey opted for the less busy "try on the crystal shoe" scene.

His foot was bigger than Cinderella's.

When we left, Katie and I took a detour to look inside a buffet restaurant called the "Queen of Hearts Banquet Hall".

It is exquisitely themed to the Queen of Hearts garden. We just wanted to peek after seeing pictures online. We didn’t eat here.

Still raining with no end in sight.

We decided to duck into the "Country Bear Jamboree: Vacation Hoedown".

We had to wait a bit in the lobby for the next show.

Katie had a seat and Mikey walked around looking at all the silly props from the Country Bears escapades.

One of the cast members engaged him and another boy to find a hidden Mickey in a picture.
They took a bit to find it, but eventually did.

The bears were all dressed up for various vacation locations – like the beach, the pool, camping. They did all the singing in Japanese, but it was still entertaining.

I’m pretty sure that after visiting the Country Bears, we decided to stop for lunch.

The Hungry Bear restaurant, unlike in Disneyland where they serve mediocre burgers, serves a Japanese comfort food staple of curry.

They had the same low allergen curry Katie had for dinner the night before.

So, we ordered up two of those for the kids and got our own curries to eat.

YUMMO.

For some reason, after lunch, Mikey got himself a churro.
Maybe it was to make up for the gross savory churro we got him the night before?

He went and ordered it himself.

We decided to do one more ride at Tokyo Disneyland.

The "Enchanted Tiki Room: Stitch Presents "Aloha E Komo Mai".

As we were waiting in line, a cast member asked if we wanted a translator for the show.

We declined.

But, I kinda wonder if it would've been an actual person or a little headphone thing.

And why was it offered just for this show and none of the others we watched?

I guess we'll never know.

While waiting in line for the Tiki Room, Huzbend saw the guy that he made friends with at the pool the day before. That's him on the right with the black baseball hat.

Small world, eh? Get it? Get it?

They had a quick "hello/goodbye/this is my wife and kids" conversation while we were entering the theater. It was cute.

The Tiki show started off the same as the other shows, but Stitch kept making mischief. Eventually, the birds and Stitch make friends and they invite him to sing along. A clever remix of the standard Enchanted Tiki Room show.

The only problem.....NO DOLE WHIPS.

The travesty.

Time to head over to Tokyo DisneySea for the rest of the day.

Here's a proper picture of us and the floaty Earth globe fountain.

We entered the park with one thing on our minds.

GREEN ALIEN MOCHI.

We stopped by the bakery that we had tried the night before, and it was still packed.

Maybe the people were still waiting in line from last night.......

A quick check online using various Tokyo Disney Resort resources told me that there was a push cart that served them in the American Waterfront area of the park.

While Huzbend and the kids parked it in front of the Tower of Terror, I wandered around looking.

I finally found the cart under the elevated train tracks.

LOOK HOW CUTE!!!!

I purchased two cups because I knew I was going to share.

They were SO yummy and chewy and mushy.

The three fillings are chocolate, vanilla and strawberry.

The overall consensus was that the chocolate was the best. It was almost like chocolate mousse.

Katie wasn’t a fan of the consistency, but liked the fillings.

Mikey had no such qualms.

On our way back to the Mermaid Lagoon, we got distracted by "Nemo and Friends: SeaRider".

We used another fastpass to ride.

It was a simulator ride with a super clean screen (no 3D glasses needed) in which we

were in a fish-shaped submarine that was shrunk down to Nemo size so that we could swim with the fish and study them.

We visited the Great Barrier Reef, entered the EAC (East Australian Current) with Crush and then played tag with sea otters in a kelp forest.

Things go wrong, as they often do on theme park rides, and we were sucked into a pipe and end up in the touch tank at the Marine Life Institute and are rescued by Hank the octopus.

I REALLY liked this ride.

I have a soft spot for Nemo.

We slowly made our way over to the Mermaid Lagoon and waited waaayyyy too long for a super short kiddie roller coaster that NO KIDS were in line to ride.

Everyone in line were either teenagers or 20 somethings.

And they ALL screamed, even though all the coaster did was go in fast circles.

We went under the sea to visit the Mermaid Lagoon. The kids wanted to ride all the rides.

Huzbend and I decided to take a load off and wait for them to ride the "Whirlpool" spinning cup ride.

The cup they picked didn’t spin. So, they just sat there being unhappy about it.

They convinced Huzbend to ride the "Jumpin' Jellyfish" with them.

The jellyfish pull you gently up and down.

It was interesting to watch this from the outside as I could see the mechanism/control board that the cast member used to monitor the ride and to start and stop it. She couldn’t start the ride until all the gates were closed and one kept lighting as open. Multiple cast members walked around and finally figured out which gate it was. It was the one right next to her, leading into her control booth.

While waiting in line for the "Blowfish Balloon Race" ride, we caught a glimpse of snorkle Goofy.

The blowfish have baskets attached to them and spin in a fast circle.

We bid farewell to the Mermaid Lagoon and headed back to Mysterious Island.

The kids wanted to ride "Journey to the Center of the Earth" one more time.

We used one of our last fastpasses on it.

We then headed over to the fortress, since that's where our dinner would be that evening.

S.E.A.

We explored the areas of the fortress that were not open the night before.

There was a remote control sailing ship thing that cost 100 yen to play.

We wandered around a bit more and Mikey set off some more cannons.

We all had a moment of zen watching the pendulum swing back and forth.

Dinner time!

This night we ate at Magellan’s, an elaborately themed gourmet dining experience and a Disney bloggers contender for best restaurant in ANY of the Disney parks around the world. No joke.

I was a little nervous about eating here. Would it be as good as I had read?

I checked in with a cast member and we waited.

Over our stay in Japan we learned that our name was usually NOT called out loud.

This was because it was usually written in English and not Kanji.

We learned to just look for the hostess who was walking around with a confused look on her face desperately hoping she wouldn’t pronounce our name wrong if she in fact had to say it out loud.

Then one of us would walk up and say our name in a questioning tone and she would answer back "Hai" (Yes!).

We were used to it by this point.

The hostess ushered us into the main area of the restaurant.

The top level is a lounge area which encircles the main dining area below.

Going down the sweeping stair case to the main floor you can take in all the details – dark, exquisitely carved wood is everywhere and paintings abound on the walls. It has a very “Renaissance” theme, if that’s a thing.

In the center of the main dining floor is a huge ornate globe and over top of that is a glass dome depicting the constellations.

As we walked down the stair case and around the globe, we were diverted off to a side entrance and faced a bookcase.

Our hostess pointed to the decorated trim around the outside of the bookcase and motioned as if we were to do the same. There was one flower on the trim that was more worn down than the others. I think Katie might’ve pushed it and the doors slid open to reveal a secret wine cellar.

Voila!

This is where our table was located.

Oh. My. God.

So awesome.

Throughout our meal the kids kept "going to the bathroom".

I think they just wanted to play with the secret door.

Huzbend and I both ordered “Assorted hors d’oeuvres,” not knowing what was included on the plate. It turned out to be small cup of cold pumpkin soup, tuna tartar, prosciutto, a bread stick, some kind of small slice of toast, cucumber/tomato pickled stuff, and a blob of stuff I couldn’t figure out what it was.

Then, for dinner, we both ordered the fillet of beef with red wine sauce.

It was fabulous, melt in your mouth beef.

Huzbend proclaimed it the best steak he had ever eaten.

I kinda want some right now. It was THAT good.

I selected crème brulee for dessert and he got the dessert special.

I don't remember what it was – pineapple coconut raspberry stuff?

When we mentioned allergies to our server, a manger came over to our table with a tablet. We selected our allergens and he actually went through the menu to see if there was anything BESIDES the “low allergen meal” that would work for Katie. Alas, it wouldn’t. But, we really appreciated him looking. This was the ONLY TIME that someone had potentially offered to find alternatives for Katie.
Unfortunately, she was relegated to the "low allergen menu" once again.

Her meal came with soy milk corn soup, hamburger steak, red snapper, mushroom and corn, hashed potato, asparagus, a cherry tomato and rice. And, to her chagrin, a jelly dessert.

She just ate the fruit on the side of the jelly.

Although, it did provide her with some entertainment.

Mikey got the kids meal/Little Explorers Set. This included corn crème soup, beef fillet, scallop, potato croquette, fried shrimp chicken rice, scrambled egg and a veggie. He selected crème brulee for dessert.

Bread also came with the meals and it was UNLIMITED!

This was unheard of in our Japan travels so far.

There was hostess whose whole job it was to wander from table to table to offer more bread.

Mikey didn't end up eating a lot of his meal and just filled up on bread.

Great ambiance and great food (although the kids weren’t to into it).

Everyone was so friendly and the was service impeccable.

AND, we got to eat in a secret room!!

As we left dinner, we had one very last fastpass to use.

This was our super special "use anywhere, at anytime" fastpass.

It was a toss up between the new "Soarin'" ride or "Toy Story Midway Mania" (TSMM).

After a vote, we chose TSMM.

This ride has its own area in the American Waterfront area of the park.
And, at night, it’s completely covered with white lights.

The entrance to the ride is in Woody's mouth.

A little creepy....

As you can see to the left, the line was huge at this point at night.

I'm happy that we had a fastpass to use.

Now, I don’t know why this is, but it seems that Tokyo Disney has super-detailed queues for some of the same rides that are in the U.S. parks.

This version of TSMM had us loading our vehicles in Andy’s bedroom.

His bed was in there with a tinker toy canopy built over top of the ride track.

Huge windows, shelves with other toys, nightlights, and a chest of drawers emphasized that we were the size of toys.

Even electrical outlets.

I don't remember this on the other TSMM versions we've been on.

But, maybe I just wasn't paying attention.

This ride is always super fun.

And, I kept my winning streak in tack.

It's okay. Huzbend always beats me at Buzz Lightyear.

Katie was kind of bummed that she didn’t get any dessert at dinner.

We decided to head back over to Tokyo Disneyland to get some soft serve ice cream.

We said our goodbyes to Tokyo DisneySea.

Mikey was a bit sad to stay goodbye.

We hopped on the resort liner monorail to Tokyo Disneyland.

As we arrived, the Dreamlights parade was going by in the hub.

This visit was wholly to find some dessert.

I found and picked up two more sets of Green Alien mochi.

Mikey grabbed one last churro.

We went back to the place we had gotten Katie ice cream on our first day, but it was closed!!

Ugh. She was sad.

I shared some mochi with her and I used one of my emergency lollipops as a backup treat.

A castle stage show was going to start in about 20 minutes.
"Donald's Hot Jungle Summer" was the theme for the summer promotion and the show was called "OH! Summer Banzai!"

There’s a lot of water effects in the show and warnings of, “You will get wet!” I made sure to ask a cast member how far the water would shoot out to make sure we wouldn’t get soaked.

We parked ourselves on a bench far enough away from the action to NOT get wet, but still be able to see the action.

In the show, Donald tries to grow a garden.