After spending a little time in the city, it was now time for a couple days at Tokyo Disney Resort. Lets start out by saying, we are HUGE fans of Tokyo Disney. We had visited Tokyo Disneyland once about a year prior to this trip and fell in love. Before we even left Tokyo last year, we knew we needed to go back and spend a little more time there. We had one day planned for each of the two parks this trip. First up was Disneyland Park!
The morning of our Disneyland day, we checked out of our hostel and grabbed a Boss Coffee from a vending machine for the road. We took the subway over to Tokyo Station and then a train to Maihama station, which is the station outside of their version of Downtown Disney/ Disney Springs. From there, we hopped onto the Disney monorail to our hotel.
Tokyo Disney Resort has four Disney hotels but also six “official” hotels which are on property and conveniently accessible by the monorail line. We were staying at one of the official non-Disney hotels, the Tokyo Bay Maihama Hotel Club Resort. We planned this trip pretty last minute (because our work schedule makes it hard to plan anything too far in advance) and we got such an incredible deal on our room here (about ¥9400/ night which was about $85 USD/ night). Although we preferred the hotel we stayed at the year before (the Sheraton Grande Tokyo Bay) and would love to stay at one of the Disney resorts in the future, we found that for the value of this resort and the location, it was a great option for those on a budget. Plus, we even had a park view (and parking lot view, haha) from our balcony! Our room wasn’t quite ready since we were there very early so the hotel stored our bags for us. We bought our park tickets in the hotel lobby to avoid crowds at the park entrance and we headed straight for the monorail over to Disneyland.
This was the view from our room!
The monorail here is THE CUTEST with its themed cars and Mickey shaped handles and windows. There are also special themed trains. This year one of the monorail trains was themed as Nemo and friends, and last year the themed monorail was Duffy, ShellieMay, and Gelatoni. The monorail we rode on was the classic Mickey themed monorail.
Before going into the park, we wanted to check out the Tokyo Disneyland Hotel. It’s such a beautiful building and its a dream of ours to stay here one day!
Tokyo Disney has a three-month long Easter celebration, even though Japan doesn’t celebrate Easter at all. Anything Tokyo Disney does, they do it well, so naturally this Easter celebration was amazing! The decorations, entertainment, food and snacks, merchandise, and characters were all themed to Easter.
As we made our way to the gates of Disneyland, we were greeted by a few characters wandering around and the first of the Usatama and character themed eggs. Usatama is a play on two Japanese words meaning egg and rabbit and these little Usatama were everywhere! We were given a park map, a Today Guide, and a free egg hunt map as we entered the park. The prize of the egg hunt was an “Usatama Chasers” sticker but confession: we didn’t find all the Usatama but we did find one of the stickers on the ground so it was a win for us.
Tokyo Disneyland is unique in that their version of Main Street U.S.A. is called World Bazaar and is a canopy covered area with two intersecting streets (Main Street and Center Street).
One of our first stops of the day was to The Great American Waffle Co. We forgot to do this on our first trip so we were sure not to miss it this time. We ordered a Strawberry & Custard Waffle and these little adorable little Mini Waffles.
Happiness Is Here Parade:
After walking around the shops and eating waffles, we sat down on the sidewalk to watch “Happiness is Here.” I mention sitting on the sidewalk because the etiquette in Japan is to sit down during the parade, which allows everyone to see the show – it is wonderful!
After the parade, we went to the Pan Galactic Pizza Port for the real reason we flew all the way across the United States and the Pacific Ocean; Green Alien Mochi!!
Tokyo Disneyland has the cutest vending machines. Just like in the city of Tokyo, vending machines were very popular in the parks and monorail stops as well. At this point in the day, we didn’t have much left to see that we hadn’t seen last year, so we just walked around aimlessly taking pictures.
One of our must do’s of the day was to find the sinks that dispense Mickey shaped soap, since last year we completely forgot about them because we were just so excited to be there.
Tokyo Disneyland Electrical Parade Dreamlights
By the time Dreamlights started, we were exhausted and freezing cold, so we just sat down and enjoyed the floats pass by without taking many pictures.
Such a wonderful day at Tokyo Disneyland. We love Tokyo Disneyland, however, this park shares several similarities to Magic Kingdom and Disneyland Park in California, so if you only have one day for the Disney Parks while in Tokyo, we recommend visiting DisneySea because it will blow you away!
Just like last year, we didn’t stay for the fireworks. Since we were still slightly jet lagged, we headed back to the hotel so we had plenty of time to get a good nights sleep and be ready for our day at DisneySea bright and early the next morning…we were SO EXCITED for our first visit!