Kid for a day.

On the 9th May, Elizabeth and I spent a day with the kids at Tokyo Disneyland. This place really sends you back to your childhood, which is really great for me as I am a firm believer in the fact that growing up is overrated and I refuse to participate.

We began by getting to all the rides that will fill up fast before they got too busy, successfully getting on Big Thunder Mountain, Splash Mountain and Space Mountain in a fairly timely manner. Space Mountain deserves special mention as it is a high speed roller coaster in the dark and while you are in the line there are numerous exits for you to chicken out called escape pods. This is a bit disconcerting as they don't have it at any other ride and there are so many of them. Adrian admitted later that he thought I would bail but I hung in there and hopped in the coaster. In the end I thought it was a really cool ride, all space themed with stars all around and stuff and really fast feeling. Being in the dark, if anything, was less scary as you could not see how high or how fast you were going. The scariest thing was Elizabeth screaming next to me.

The Mickey Mouse 3D movie was phenomenal, I was sticking my hand out trying to touch stuff, amazingly real, it included actual water splashing on you and the seats moving and shaking at appropriate moments and finished with an actual physical event (I won't spoil the surprise). The space blaster ride had us going around with a laser gun shooting the bad guys with my score being comparable with Adrian's and Andrew's. We even sat on the road and watched the disney float parade and did the cute 'its a small world' ride where to the song of 'its a small world' you saw moving dolls of children in costumes from different nationalities (I don't think I quite went back far enough in my childhood to get the full benefit from this one).

Surprising enjoyment was had on the spinning teacups which I thought would be either having me throw up or be fairly lame, but it was hilarious in practice. Elizabeth, Andrew and I took a teacup where we kept spinning to a minimum until near the end and I filmed the other big kids spinning themselves into a frenzy. It was a great day, unfortunately coming to a premature end due to rain settling in before dark.

The rest of the time in Tokyo was taken up exploring some parts of the city during the day and night. The lights in the city at night were as overwhelming as all the movies have you expect it to be and during the day we found a statue of liberty. Special thanks to our tour guides Adrian and Mariko who gave up part of their honeymoon to show us around and are bigger kids than I am, which made it great fun.