DisneySea

If you have never been to a Disney theme park then its hard to explain how detailed everything is. Disney Sea is different to Disney Land as it looks to be intended for an older target audience instead of families. It still has all the family stuff but it felt a lot less kiddish. A small fact about the two parks in Japan is that they are the only two in the world that are not owned by Disney themselves.

The park has 7 sections, the Mediterranean Harbor, Mysterious Island, Mermaid Lagoon, Arabian Coast, Loser River Delta, Port Discovery and the American Waterfront and they are all themed extremely well. The rides, food and restaurants all relate to the area perfectly.

Like Universal Studios, Disney Sea offers a Fast Pass system to help you get a ticket in line in the future so you can enjoy the park and come back at that time to get to near the front of the line. The one benefit about the Disney system is thats its FREE, you don't have to pay any extra to use this feature. It was great last time I went to Disney as the park was a little busy but this time round Disney Sea wasn't at all busy so we just waited in line. A couple of the rides we had to wait 30 or so minutes but others we were able to get straight on.

We got in to the park about lunch time and were greeted by a small show out the front of the Mediterranean Harbor with Daffy, Donald, Mickey, Minnie, Goofy and the whole crew dancing away singing crap in Japanese. Then we headed for to the American waterfront area and passed all the Venice canals with gondolas passing through them.

We came to our first ride, the Tower of Terror. This ride is inside a big crazy tower which drops you from a height, in the dark. I thought this was going to be hell scary like those ones which drop you faster than gravity but it wasn't. You sat with about 16 people together on the ride and you were able to take your belongings on with you, plus you were held in with a normal seat belt. This instantly gave away how lame it was going to be :) It was alright though, they throw you up to the top of the tower and down a few levels back up and open the window at the top fo the tower so you can see all over the park then all the way back down to the bottom again!

Next we had lunch, a Hamburger and Fries in an ole American shed which just happened to have a chipmunk show on stage when we rocked up. Not knowing we watched it and then headed off to the Port of Discovery, A section themed as if it was from a science fiction book. There was a bumper boat ride which when I saw how fast they were going I had to go on it but upon closer inspection they were little boats on rails under the water.. pass.

Stormrider had no line so we jumped on board. Your immersed in a spaceship in the future and your mission is to go out into the storm, fire your weapon and take the storm down. Your spaceship is on hydraulics so your thrown about everywhere to match what happens on the big screen. Water is sprayed on you to get the feeling of going through the storm and by the time the end came I sort of felt a bit motion sickness, I guess the ride did its job :)

The Lost River Delta was next and this was based on Indiana Jones. It had two rides, a small themed ride on a coaster of sorts where you go through chasing the Crystal Skull. Essentially your helping or following Indy through some of the scenes out of the movies. One included where you steal the Gold Idol and you set of the booby traps and you have to run away with the walls shooting spears at you. The other main scene was when the big ball comes chasing after you, in this case your heading right for a massive 3+ meter ball as it rolls towards you and just before you get to it your thrown down under the ball at a fast pace and this is pretty much were the ride ends. A very well themed ride.

The other ride was a small roller coaster, about the size of the one we have at Adventure world except this one has a 360 degree loop. I almost had troubles getting on this ride because I was too tall.. TOO TALL!! The ride was ok, it took you to the top of the coaster and at the start of coasters you always get that big drop but this one started like that but then took you back up again. You were about to scream and then.. nope. By the time you got to the 360 loop you weren't going that fast but they had steam/smoke before the loop and after it so you couldn't see the entry and exit to the loop. It was themed as very old and rusty and they did the job great. The ride was alright :)

Around the park we went skipping through the Arabian Coast as it was all about alladin and was orientated towards children.

Megan loves Ariel from The Little Mermaid so we had to go to Mermaid Lagoon. I knew this was going to be orientated towards children and the rides were but the place was awesome. So colourful and weird, I think someone spiked the Disney "Imagineers" drinks. A very whacky fantasy land. They had a Little Mermaid show which we watched and it was pretty awesome. Massive mechanical and human controlled puppets flying out from the roof and from everywhere. Very cool indeed.

Located in the middle of the park is a massive volcano which constantly has smoke coming out of it and often erupts with flames flying out of it. Under this volcano are two rides, 20,000 Leagues under the Sea and the Journey to the Centre of the Earth.

The 20,000 leagues under the sea ride placed you inside a small submarine and it took you down under the water to view whats deep down below. But you didn't really go underwater, instead the submarine capsule you ride in had two layers of glass on the windows and between them it was filled with water. The pumped air bubbles into this to give you the feeling of submerging, hitting objects and coming back up to the surface.

The other ride, Journey to the Centre of the Earth was a coaster ride which took you inside the volcano showing what lives beneath us. The best part was the finale where they flung you up a hill fast and then you appeared through a gap in the mountain so you could see the park and nothing else ahead of you. The track then throw you back down again into the mountain into the dark and then around a sharp corner up again into an opening and then back down again to the end of the ride. Something we weren't expecting.

We finished off the park with a dinner at one of the few table serviced restaurants in the park and then headed out to the watch the Christmas carol lights around the Harbor.

A few crazy things about the park.

1. how many different flavours of popcorn they have for sale.
2. Everyone had these hats which they wore, they were all Disney heads and looked to keep your head very warm. I looked for an alien one (from toy story) to wear camping but couldn't find one :(
3. In the carpark I saw the most modified cars together that I had ever seen throughout Japan.

The park was great and it is a lot different than Disneyland. So if you've been to any of the Disneyland's around the world you will know that they are all the same, except Disney Sea. It was very hard to fault anything, everything was so well themed. Everything.

Pics

Shaun

Apartment

As some of you may know we hired a serviced apartment in Tokyo (Roppongi Hills) for two weeks as it had some of the comforts of a home like a kitchen, a laundry and also being in the same place for two weeks is alot more relaxing than shifting hotels all the time. After some research we found it was actually cheaper to stay at a serviced apartment than at a hotel, we paid under $2000 AUD for this room for two weeks and a hotel in tokyo of this size would be well over 200$ per night and without the extra comforts of the kitchen and laundry.

The apartment is on the 10th floor (top) of the Court Annex building owned by Asahi Homes, yes the same Asahi that makes the AWESOME Asahi Super Dry beer, softdrinks, newspapers and the other 400 other products. It is across the road from Roppongi Hills, a 4 billion dollar complex built to allow people to work, live and be entertained in the same area saving travelling times and improving the quality of life.

My opinion, its another office building with the normal amount of restaurants, cinema's, shops surrounding it. The only difference is there are a couple of luxury apartment skyscrapers built near the main tower. If you have a extremely high up in the ladder job and can afford one of these apartments then yes, it is what they had planned for, but for the normal joe who works in Toyko and has to commute and hour or more to get here then no. To back this up. The only shops in the complex are Tiffany, Versace, Louis Vitton, Kate Space, Escada, MaraMax, Christian Lacroix, Hugo Boss and all these other ones ive never heard. the other main building in the complex is Asahi TV, yep, they do TV too and have 3 or more channels here in tokyo and this year they are 50years old!

Enough of that, our apartment is an ok size, its a 35sqm studio apartment so the living room and bedroom are essentially in the same room with a 1m high wall divider between them. An extremely small kitchen which has no bench space at all, a normal size fridge, oven, microwave etc. Behind that is our laundry which is a refrigerator size recess with a washer and dryer to do our laundry and also our bathroom which is a normal size fibreglass hotel which you will find in all hotels in Japan.

It came with an 80cm LCD tv, DVD, VCR (which i cant friggin figure out how to do the simplest thing and thats record. even after pressing the record button and every other combination. grrrr, piece of crap) and thank fark, cable tv. We have about 50 channels which are japanese but thankfully there are 10 english/bilingual channels, 5 movie and tv show channels and 5 documentary channels like discovery, NG and history so we can get home after a day of walking around everywhere and viewing the sites and just sit down and relax watching TV in English.

Roppongi is apparently the nightlife part of Tokyo and after walking the main streets of the area you can see why. There are a ton of clubs in the area compared to the other main area's of Tokyo and im talking a club every 20-30m surrounded by restaurants.

All in all, its a good little apartment right in the middle of Tokyo.

Some more pictures of our apartment and the area around.

Shaun

Umeda Sky Building

This building is one of the skyscrapers in Osaka, it is two towers linked together at the top. There are tons of buildings all over Japan just like this but what makes it different is on the top of the building you can go out into the open and view the city at 173m above the city floor.

The other thing which makes this building unique is that the two towers are connected via escalators with nothing below them except the ground some 40 stories below.

You catch a glass lift up to about the 35th floor and then hop on an escalator in one tower and ride up to the top of the building on the other tower. Here you can access the sky walk which we did at 7pm at night and it was damn freezing. It it wasn't so cold we would have stayed out there for a lot longer as it was good viewing the city from that high.

We got out of there and headed back down the other escalators and back down the lift to the ground floor where there was some German festival on selling all kinds of Japanese German stuff. I bought some candy, it was about the only place we have found proper candy in Japan. They call cakes and biscuits confectionery over here so confectionery stores are just packed full of that. :(

Osaka Aquarium

The Osaka aquarium is a huge with around 5500 cubic meters of water, 16 tanks and it uses so much acrylic glass that it has 1.5 times the annual production of acrylic glass used just at this aquarium. The windows used are huge and the largest one measures six meters by five meters and is 30cm thick! The aquarium's tanks represent the ring of fire and ring of death areas of the Pacific Ocean and all the animals are from that area.

You begin at the top of the building around 6 stories up where you are 'above ground' and get to see a few otters and a sloth in the tree above. You then walk down slowly seeing the top of the various tanks they have. One with dolphins, another with seals and another with sea otters. These are otters but a hell of alot bigger, they are about the size of a seal. I didn't even know they existed this big.

You then progress down and down seeing below the water and into the tanks and what lies below. The main large tank had the usual sharks, fish and stingrays all ranging from small to freakn massive and the one which stood out the most was the massive Whale Shark present.

Other tanks included the great barrier reef which was jam packed with tropical fish. Another tank had 5 or so dolphins in there, this tank was quite small and for an active mammal like that you'd expect them to have a much larger tank.

Once you got to the bottom of the ocean you are left with the ugly jellyfish and huge crabs. *shudder*.

The weirdest fish there was the Sunfish, it was round, around 1m in radius and sorta thin. It had the ugliest face and mouth and it was in a tank of its own. Inside that tank though it was inside a net and you could see why. It would swim around and then just head straight for the glass and try to smack into it, luckily for the fish the netting was there to stop it :)

It was a pretty good aquarium and one of the largest ive been too.

Click here for some pics.

Baseball

I've always liked baseball for some reason and the Japanese absolutely love it so I thought it would be a good time to find a match on our holiday. I tried looking for some matches when we were to be in Tokyo but none were scheduled until I came across a poster in Osaka. We checked out the website and yep, baseball games for two weeks.

It was the Amateur League so we were able to get into the ball park for 1000 odd yen ($10) for 3 games. When we were in line to buy a ticket an old guy came up to us and gave us a free one, we thanked him a heap and went on our way. We entered the park and they were trying to ask us what team we were on and we had no idea so we just went to the right, found a tunnel and then a seat. We were then barracking for team TOSHIBA, I still don't know to this date what the friggin teams real name was because all they kept chanting was TOSHIBA and none of their merchandise had it either. Weird.

As we were watching the game the same guy who gave us the free ticket came past again and this time gave us a TOSHIBA team shirt so we began barracking for them. 30minutes later he came back again with another shirt for me. We paid him pack later with a pint of Asahi and some nuts. The Japanese are a too damn friendly :)

Beer at a baseball game is an important factor and these guys know how to do it. They have a bunch of people walking the stands with kegs on their back flogging a pint of beer for 700yen ($7). This made it way to easy to get drunk. Waaaaaay too easy.

Our team lost, and after all that cheering :( We stayed for the next game, Tokyo Gas vs Daiwa Gas and we were on the Tokyo Gas side. Their team mascots walk around handing out fans for you to help cheer the team on. An excellent way to get everyone on their side.

This time our team won. After all that booze and cheering it was worth it.

We somehow made our way back to Osaka and grabbed dinner, it was a great day relaxing watching the baseball and drinking beer.

Shaun

Kyoto's Geisha

Gion Corner is a theater that hosts seven different types of traditional japanese art. It is located in Gion, the land of Geisha's, as well as adult entertainment.

Chando (tea ceremony) Gagaku (court music)
Koto (japanese harp) Bunraku (puppet play)
Kado (flower arrangement) Kyomai (kyoto style dance)
Kyogen (comic plays)

I was not sure how they would get thru all these forms in 40min but it was achieved by doing some of the acts at the same time.
The chando commenced first using two participants from the audience. Half way thru the ceremony, ladies started playing koto & another lady & her assistant performed kado.
Gagaku was good except for one weird recorder that made you think it was broken. A dancer dressed like a warrior also performed.
Kyogen was funny. Three men performed a play about a lord tricking his servants and tying their hands up so they wouldn't drink his sake while he went to town. They managed to still be able to drink it without there hands and got pissed. He came back not happy!
The kyomai was slow but precise. The geisha's dancing looked young and it was mainly hand movements.
Bunraku was a one scene, one puppet play. Three people operated the puppet that would have been about 150cm tall. All wore black including their faces except for the main operator. His facial expressions showed the same as the puppets.

It was good to see the theatre. We would have pictures but being the good people we are and knowing that you cant photograph/film shows, we did not bring the camers. Apparently thou this time you could. Audience members were filming and taking photos with flash! Poo to them.

We also missed on taking photos of the old buildings and streets of Gion. They were cobblestoned, tree lined, dim light, very romantic. We saw a few geisha moving from building to building as well. A taxi went past with three in it and it was a little haunting. Yellow taxi with three white faces of old times. There was also modern geisha's out and about but they wore elegant dinner dresses.

Megan

Bike Riding around Kyoto

Bike riding!!! What is Shaun getting us into. We have hired bikes for our second day. At first we were abit dubious of the traffic but got the hang of the of it. Some cyclists were even driving into the traffic.

First stop was an art & craft market at Chionji Temple. It was PACKED! So many people in such a small place. There was a good variety of different items as well as food,some of it scary looking. Unfortunatley most of it was wood products which Border Patrol would not like. When then rode thru the Kyoto Imperial Place area. We went to get tickets to visit the palace but it was lunchtime so we didnt hang around.

We rode to Nijo Castle. The castle is surrounded by a tall wall and a moat. There are the biggest koi we have seen in there. The building was typical of japanese old skool architecture but it had "Nightingale Floorings". The floors around the rooms were wood decking but were designed so that the flooring nails rubbed against a jacket or clamp, causing chirping noises. It was used as a secruity device. The castle had beautiful gardens as well. Small waterfalls with large ponds and sculptured trees.

Cycling down the Kamo River towards Kyoto Station was an easy way to escape the traffic. It was just like the Swan River, lots of people out walking, riding except there were a few shanty homes. Skillfully made of tarps and wood. Some were even padlocked.

We parked in an area that we were not too sure if it was the right spot but other bikes we there. Did our business inside and come out to a shock. Our bikes were gone, all the bikes in our area had gone. Then I noticed the official looking man just moving the bicycles to another location. Phew! Would have cost a few pennies getting them back. Back up the river and home.

Megan

Kyoto City

First day in Kyoto was a relaxing one, just walked around checking things out but there was a couple of highlights.

While I was window shopping, Shaun walked off with the map scoping out the malls. I turned to let him know I was going inside when I saw an older lady take his arm. I caught up to them and she was taking him to the police kiosk, must've thought he was lost. In broken english and japanese we convinced her we were not lost.

We caught the train to Kyoto Train Station. This 15 storey building is made of glass and steel and has many escalators. At the top of the escalators there is a sky garden from which you can view out over kyoto and down into the station. A small piece of green in all the concrete. On the train ride to the station, there was a school boy flaked out on the seat. He must've been so tired and was falling off the seat. Suddenly he woke up, jumped off the train and crossed to the other train line. We think he missed his stop.

Megan

Universal Studios

Universal Studios Japan is apparently veryt similar to the Universal park in Orlando, USA except this one was built on an old contaminated site. This might explain the extreme happiness of the all the park staff and its craziness.

The park is themed into its different sections like new york, hollywood, Amity Village (jaws), Jurassic park, Snoopy Studios etc. It basically a mix of shows, rides and a crapload of merchandise.

Some of the shows included Shrek 4-D, Terminator 2 - 3D and there were many others. Were weren't really interested in any shows but as we were walking around we just happened to come across the Waterworld show which was just starting so we took a look. It was basically a 20minute action scene in an outdoor theatre including boats, fireworks, fighting, jet ski's and a almost full scale sized plane flying over the wall towards the audience giving everyone a scare.

Univeral Studio's offers a different way of reducing the waiting time for rides than Disney and thats buy paying an extra premium at the gate. Basically for an extra 22$ you can get four fast passes which enable you to go into another line and usually wait 1/4 or 1/10 of the time. This was well worth the money as the park wasn't too busy and allowed us to go onto the ride in no time as the lines were still 30-45mins long if you had no pass. Screw going to a theme park in peak season.

The rides we went on were:

Spiderman, you sat in a moving vehicle/pod thing and wore 3d glasses. The pod was on a tracks and was hydrualically controlled so you were move and thrown about here and there. The effects were quite good using alot of flames, hot air and water. The best effects were the feelings of extreme movement via the pod moving and also the 3d movie. One of them included flying up up above a skyscraper then back down against the road. This ride was quite good.

Back to the Future, your in a delorian and in a huge imax theatre and you are basically taken through time and into different scenarious. it was ok.

Jurassic park, a log cabin ride through some rivers with a few animatronic robots and the finale was a 25m near veritcal drop into the waters below. It was a pretty short ride and sorta boring, bar the drop at the end.

Jaws, your in a tour boat around Amity Village and Jaws is chasing you and the finale is him being fried to death. Sneh. :)

I got to see a delorean back to the future version (replica) :)

Because the park wasn't very busy and we had our fast passes we were able to get around the park in only a few hours so we had to kill some time until the days show finale, Peter Pans Neverland so we went to the Hard Rock Cafe for dinner. We thought the meals were a bit expensive for what they were but when they came out they were friggin huge, neither of us could finish our meals.

The peter pan show was in the huge lake within the park. It was basically the story of peter pan with fireworks, trampolines, music and the peter pan flying 30 odd meters into the air above the lake and the audiences.

Basically Univeral Studios is family oriented so you couldn't really go there expecting hard core extreme rides so they are a bit lame if your looking for a good scare. An example of this is their Dream Ride rollercoaster which looks to be for Cinderella with all its lights and looked quite slow for its size. It was still good though with how well everything was themed.

Pictures

Shaun

Akashi-Kaikyō Bridge

This bridge is a sight to see and is part of the Honshu-Shikoku Bridge Project which is a group of bridges connecting the islands of Honshu and Shikoku. Many of the bridges in this group set various records for length and size and are also in the top lists for the same reasons.

Approaching it via train from Kobe you begin to see the 298m tall supporting towers over the hills, the closer you get the more you realise how damn big this bridge is. In reference to something local the bankwest tower antenna tip is 248m tall and these towers which hold the bridge up are over 50m higher.

Unfortunately we were unable to walk the bridge or even walk a part of it so we were only able to see it from below but it is still amazing at its size. The roadway above sits 50m above you which had a gallery/cafe but that was closed on the day we went.

Beneath the roadway was a museum dedicated to the bridge which showed you how it was build and all the engineering feats they had to overcome to build a bridge of that magnitude. They had two scale models of the bridge, a 1:40 scale which they used in wind tunnel testing and also a smaller 1:1000 scale showing its surroundings. Another scale model included all the other bridges in the Honshu-Shikoku Bridge Project.

Megan also got to build her own bridge in the special learning school :)

Some Statistics on the bridge which took 12 years to build.
Length: 3911 meters
Central Span: 1991 meters
Tower Height: 298 meters
More info at wikipedia.org

Shaun