Each float had different music blaring, but they'd timed it so that you couldn't really hear any other floats by the time the next one rolled into earshot. Here's Minnie, and some dancers dressed as trees...
Beauty and the Beast... Sleeping Beauty and her prince...
Cinderella... Pocahontas...
Some flowers... and an extremely enthusiastic Tigger!
To say the least!
The rest of the Pooh friends got to take it a bit easier...
And this was the moment that I decided that the next time I buy a bicycle, it has to look like this. Probably not the Giraffe one, though...
The lion king costumes were pretty cool. And of course, Simba got pride of place.
Can you see the girl in the bottom left of the Zebra photo above? She was a Disney employee positioned squatting on the edge of the crowd to prevent us spilling out into places we weren't supposed to be. She spent the entire parade crouched there with the unhappiest expression in the world on her face. I wonder how many times she's had to sit through the parade?
But back to happier topics... Lilo and Stitch rolled through...
And another flower, with a costume I LOVED... a very cool Chinese-dragon-style Crocodile from Peter Pan...
And then Peter Pan and the others on a boat that swung forwards and backwards. Looked pretty precarious!
I'm not sure what these fancy costumes were for, but I'm thinking they were a pretty cool reference to Japanese Haraujuku style with their craziness and their bubbles!
Then Monsters Inc came through... and this is when Tom decided that the smile on Sulley's face makes him look exactly like a friend of his. A compliment? Hmm. Perhaps not.
Monsters Inc alien dancers came through, and the Toy Story toys...
Mr and Mrs Incredible, on things that looked like hovercrafts... pretty cool...
And then came other dancers with more spectacular costumes. And I managed to capture the poor grumpy crowd guard girl again.
The grand finale involved Mickey and his crew... and a fairy who I'm assuming is Tinkerbell.
We decided to move on from there to the Pirates of the Caribbean ride, which didn't seem to be all that popular, the line was only about 5 minutes long. Very short, by Disney standards! And we loved it! The ride itself was just a boatride, but they'd obviously put a lot of effort into all the scenery we passed, which involved a lot of moving parts. It was great! This horrible photo was my attempt at capturing one of the Captain Jack Sparrow mannequins. He looked so realistic, I could have sworn that Johnny Depp was actually sitting there!
So, feeling all swash-buckling-like, we couldn't resist a bit of sword play outside the souvenir shop. This was Tom's extremely un-scary attempt.
So I decided to show him how it's done.
I think this is supposed to be my scary face. Not so good at that, by the looks of it. But how funny is the reflection of Tom's Donald Duck hat (more on that here) in my sword?
We then went on a couple of other rides, Splash Mountain (which was good, but getting pretty dated), Thunder Mountain (also good), and then we decided to take it easy for a bit, needing a little sustenance. It was good fun crowd-watching. Never a dull moment at Disney! The funniest thing we observed was all these little kids, curled up fast asleep on their parents' laps on picnic benches. It's a big day! We're adults (some of the time), and we were exhausted!
But we dragged our tired, tired feet off to the Monsters Inc ride, calculating that based on its 40 minute wait time, we would be out just in time to grab ourselves a spot for the night parade. The Monsters Inc ride was good, although I again got the feeling that we're a little above the targeted age bracket. Not surprising.
We couldn't resist grabbing a waffle in the shape of Mickey's face to snack on while we waited for the night parade to begin...
And then...drumroll...it began!
What can I say? It was spectacular. I was in awe.
And thank goodness we had Tom's camera with us, because mine would have had no chance at capturing all of these moving lights so well!!!
I'm here's Alice with the Cheshire Cat...
Puff the Magic Dragon was incredible. Snow White made an appearance...
The Peter Pan team had one of the most amazing-looking ships I've ever seen!
One of the real stars of the show was the Genie from Aladdin.
He kept changing outfits. Fantastic!
The Pooh and Toy Story families rolled along too...
Nemo and Monsters Inc... (how cute is the Disney Castle in comparison to the giant Sulley?)
Cinderella's float (and gown) underwent a transformation as she went along, from purple dress to shiny white princess dress...
There were more couples dancing, spinning around and around on their float...fairies...
And then I decided to switch from taking photos to capturing some video for the finale. Here it is.
Spectacular or what? We were pretty awestruck!
And then we turned around, to start making our way out of the park, along with the millions and millions of other people trying to do the same thing.
This is what the crowd in the opposite direction looked like.
And here we are all squeezing through to the entrance gate. I do have to say, the crowd managed to move incredibly fast considering how much of a bottle neck it was!
Here we are almost at the gate...
And we just had to take a last parting shot with flower garden Mickey... shame that Donald seems to have been put away for the night.
And that was that! Our Tokyo Disneyland experience!
But I'm afraid our night was nowhere near over, there. We took the free shuttle bus back to our hotel, but because we'd only booked to stay there two nights (and had already done so), we had to then collect them, make our way to the train station, and head off to our next hotel. Thankfully we managed to establish in broken English with the staff at the front desk that there was an ordinary bus that stopped just outside the hotel and could take us to the train station. We managed to catch it without too much drama, and several trains later (unfortunately there wasn't a direct line straight from Tokyo Bay to our next destination, Kiba - an area closer in to Tokyo), we arrived.
Now is probably a good time to tell you that, in booking our trip, we had decided to make an adventure of our accommodation that night. We were staying in a capsule hotel.
What's a capsule? This.
In a line of these.
We knew we were being crazy, but hey, when were we ever going to have a chance to experience that again? And to be honest, we expected it to be worse than it was. The worst part for me was the shared bathing facilities, involving no alternative but to get naked (sorry to use the word "naked" in a Disney post) and shower in front of a bunch of other women. And we didn't sleep very well, waking up at every sound around us. The capsules don't have doors as such, just blinds that you pull down, so we could hear everyone else arriving or leaving.
The verdict? Interesting, very economical, and glad we've done it. Just won't do it again.
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