Day Two - Tokyo DisneySea

When we had finished at Fortress Explorations, we headed toward the volcano, home of the absolutely mind-boggling Mysterious Island. DisneySea is full of eye candy, and Mysterious Island is one of the most eye-popping things ever. It is like experiencing a Jules Verne novel in real life.

You enter via a tunnel carved through the side of the volcano, and find yourself in the crater. Below you can see the Nautilus docked. Above is a huge "drilling machine" stuck into the rocks. Blasts of steam vent from parts of the crater (these blasts are visible -- and audible -- from other parts of the park).

There are only two attractions in Mysterious Island, but they are doozies. This port is home to the biggest E-Ticket ride in the whole park: Journey to the Center of the Earth. It's the one DisneySea attraction everyone rushes toward when the park opens. Wouldn't you know it, our trip coincided with a rare closure of the attraction for refurbishment!

We were disappointed about missing Journey to the Center of the Earth, but we very much enjoyed the other attraction, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. You descend a long spiral walkway to get to 20,000 Leagues, which gives you an opportunity to scope out all of the fabulous scenery within the crater.

On this attraction you are loaded into small spherical submarines and enjoy a "dangerous" ride along the ocean floor, encountering a giant squid and other wonders of the deep. The narration is entirely in Japanese, but it's pretty obvious what's going on. Unfortunately I don't have any photos the ride itself because it's very dark inside, and I think photography was prohibited anyway.

As I may have mentioned before, Tokyo Disneyland and DisneySea both have a huge number of full-service restaurants, and they are all elaborately themed. I really regretted that I didn't have time to try them all out! A good example of this was the Vulcania Restaurant in Mysterious Island. It's a Chinese restaurant themed to look like the inside of a Verne-inspired geothermal power station. Wild.

Mysterious Island is also the home of the famous Gyoza Sausage Bun, which is sold from a vending cart. This snack is a huge favorite of the Japanese, and on busy days the line to purchase one can be huge! Fortunately we were visiting on a relatively slow day (midweek during a non-holiday period), so we only had to wait in line for about 15 minutes. We certainly couldn't miss this famous snack item.

For the uninitiated, the Gyoza Sausage Bun is a doughy steamed bun about the shape and size of a hot dog bun, but filled with mild pork sausage. The bun itself is very similar to Chinese steamed buns (bao), and the filling is the same as you'll find in potstickers (gyoza). So in effect, it's like two types of dim sum mixed together.

I liked my bun a lot and felt the sausage had a subtle tinge of garlic and ginger that made it very tasty. Plus, it's a substantial and filling snack and moderately priced at ¥399. Mike thought it was unspeakably bland, so go figure.

We sat on a bench and did a little people-watching while we ate our buns and drank lemon soda. It was amusing to see how the line for the buns never let up.

Back to Part 8 of the Tokyo Disney Resort trip report.

		Where's the rest of the report? Sorry, but this where I ran out of steam. My husband's report mentions a few other things we did at DisneySea. I hope we'll go back to Tokyo at some point in the future, and I will try to cover the attractions that didn't get included in this report. Thanks for reading this far!

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