Travel Tuesday: Tokyo Disneyland

best photo ever. period.

 A couple summers ago I was living in Tokyo for a month doing research. I was living alone and didn't know a single person in the area so I used Travel Buddy to find some solo travelers who were also interested in checking out some of the sights. Since meeting people on the internet can be sketchy to say the very least, we set up a public meeting point in the middle of one of the busiest train stations in Tokyo. Thankfully we were all pretty normal, and thus we were able to continue on with our plans to check out Tokyo Disneyland together.

Carolin {Singapore}, Art {Australia}, Jess {US of A}

 This meet up was particularly useful for me because I spoke no Japanese and am a vegetarian. I know, it seems like Japan would be a vegetarian paradise, right? Nope. Not even close. I lost somewhere between 8-10lbs because all I ate was seaweed and edamame. Seriously, I was in a soy induced permanent state of PMS from all the edamame I ate. Enter the I the lovely Carolin from Singapore, who not only spoke Japanese but was also a vegetarian. Carolin and I hung out for a week or so and during that time she taught me how to recognize vegetarian food in the store, for which I am forever thankful for.

i want my hair to look like this.

 Anyway, back to Tokyo Disneyland. It was awesome. I mean, I LOVE Disneyworld. Once my family was on vacation to go visit some relatives in Ohio, we were on the road for 30 minutes or so before my dad said, "Does anyone actually want to go to Ohio?" Unsurprisingly, he was met with a deafening silence. So we decided to drive to Disneyworld instead (to understand the absurdity of this, Ohio was an 8 hour drive from our home, Disneyworld was a 24 hour drive). We made reservations to stay when we were a few hours out from arrival. All in all I think it's one of the more ridiculous stories our family has.

ngl, i think my legs look pretty nice here.

Okay, bring it back to Tokyo Disneyland, again. Of course I love it, it's Disney! I also loved that the park info specifically warned that if you were over 6'5" you would not on the rides. I'm only 5'4" and at the time I was pretty thin (from only eating seaweed and edamame), and even my ass got stuck more than one time.

Tokyo DisneySea. Being that I don't speak Japanese I had no idea wtf was going on, ever.

we got into the spirit of things.

 We also went to Tokyo DisneySea, which was also awesome, of course. I'm still not sure I understand what was going on there, but basically it was broken up into several themed "worlds" (of course) around a lagoon. I'm still not sure what it had to do with any large salty bodies of water. However, wikipedia just informed me that it's the most expensive theme park ever built and that it's not actually owned by Disney (and is also the only Disney park not actually owned by Disney). Anyway, they had a steampunk land called Mysterious Island, which was my favorite simply by default of being steampunk.

It's kind of weird, but I'm such a Disney fanatic that even being at a Disney theme park in a country were I had no idea what was going on and couldn't understand a word (which made the Jungle Cruise even more ridiculous, since the entire ride is based on bad jokes I knew were happening but couldn't understand) made me feel a bit more at home.

Oh, also, Art and I were like the only white people at DisneySea. On top of that we were so white that several school girls asked to take photos with us. BOOM.