We weren't in a great hurry today, because as we found out last night, Disneyland is only open incredibly short trading hours during winter. The park opens at 10am, and is closed by 7pm.

We made our way downstairs at around 8:30am to the Palm Terrace Hotel's buffet breakfast. Customers purchase a ticket from a vending machine just outside the door to the restaurant for some reason, and inside is a buffet breakfast of eggs, mini hamburgers, corn, a variety of different pastries and croissants, cold pasta, potato salad and coleslaw, fruit, yoghurt, juices, teas and coffee. Not cheap, at around $10 for adults, and $5 for kids, but it was a great breakfast, and a good start to what is usually a long day at Disney.

Unfortunately, the weather today was postcard perfect. I say unfortunately because in my experience, if the weather is even a little adverse, the crowds will stay away. Not so today. I picked our Disneyland and Disneysea days to fall on the lowest Disneyland crowd attendance days, according to an online Disneyland crowd predictor. Unfortunately the predictor failed to predict that every schoolkid in Tokyo would skip school to come to Disneyland, and every parent would take the day off work, also to come to Disneyland. It was packed. It was more crowded than when we went in August on the first trip.

Over an hour before opening time we boarded the courtesy bus from the hotel to the Disneyland gates, and already there were thousands of people patiently queuing, as the Japanese love to do.
Having already bought tickets, we patiently queued too, for the better part of an hour.
At 10am on the dot the gates opened, and the sea of people burst through the dam of the ticket scanning and baggage inspection stations, and flooded into the park as quick as their little legs could carry them.


Disney staff tried in vane to slow the thousands of sprinting people, by quietly saying "Please slow down", and making stop signs with their hands. Not surprisingly it wasn't working. Some people briefly slowed down to a fast run instead of a sprint, but most people just ignored the attendants completely, and sprinted past (or into) the attendants on their way to whatever ride they wanted to get onto first.

Disney has only themselves to blame for this idiotic behaviour. Customers are permitted to either line up for an hour or more, or scan their Disney admission ticket for a "Fastpass" onto their chosen ride, which allows them to come back during a 1 hour designated time bracket, and you can only get one Fastpass ticket at a time, or only one Fastpass every 2 hours, whichever comes first. The problem is that on crowded days, the Fastpass tickets for the good rides are all taken by lunchtime, and since the park only opens at 10am, and closes at 7pm, you can only get 1, or maybe 2 Fastpass tickets, assuming you want to go on the good rides, before the Fastpass allocations are exhausted for these rides. The system is stupid.

Needless to say, we didn't run like the other 90% of park patrons. We took our time entering the park, and got some photos around the entryway, and around Cinderella's castle, etc. So by the time we'd got to Space Mountain and the other popular rides, there was a 60 minute wait time for a ride. We booked a fastpass ticket to the Toy Story ride, and headed to the kids rides in search of teacups and princesses. Isabelle's choice.

The teacups were the first rides of the day. Always a favourite with the girls, these were unpopular enough that there was a managable wait time, so we were able to have a couple of rides without standing like idiots for the 90 minute wait time that the other rides were now commanding.

We might have been in the wrong place at the wrong time today, because there were virtually no characters walking around anywhere. To our surprise an hour or so into the day we finally found a Disney princess, Rapunzel. When we got there however, we were told by the curt Japanese minders that the princess would no longer be meeting with the public, because she had to be elsewhere. With that, Isabelle burst into tears with disappointment, loudly enough for the princess to notice, ignore her handlers (and told them to stand down), and come over to comfort her, give her a hug and make her feel better. Whoever the princess was, she was fantastic. Her Disney uniformed minders however were simply rude, and very un-Disney like. We weren't the only ones they offended.

After Rapunzel, our Fastpass for the Toy Story ride was now available, so we walked down towards that ride. On the way we came across Esmerelda, the princess from the Hunchback of Notre Dame. No, we'd never heard of her either, and we actually had to get her to explain who the hell she was supposed to be. I guess that comes with the territory if you're forced to walk around as one of the more obscure princesses. None of the girls had heard of her, and since she wasn't Cinderella or Sleeping Beauty, Isabelle quickly grew tired of her, and decided to move on.

Other than on the parades, Rapunzel and Esmerelda were the only 2 princesses we came across today. On previous visits there have been many princesses and characters walking around. Today however it must have been a character day off, because it was barren of princesses, and any of the high profile Disney characters. Occasionally you'd see a cat or some kind of bird wandering around, but that was about it. There is a "meet Mickey" attraction, where parents with kids, and Japanese schoolgirls line up to meet and cuddle a guy in a Mickey Mouse costume. At one point when we were in the vicinity I noticed the wait time for this was 90 minutes.

Despite what you see in the advertisements and brochures, which you're bombarded with if you're staying at a Disney partner hotel like we were, Disneyland is less about "happiness" and "delight", and much more about queuing and waiting. Want food? Queue. Want a ride? Queue. Want a decent spot to watch a parade? Queue. When the trading day is only 9 hours long, and over an hour of that is taken up by parades, a few hours of queuing soaks up a good percentage of the day.


After some lunch, and a few rides on some of the less popular rides in the park, such as the racing cars (which the girls love), I set up camp for an agonising period siting in the same spot on a cold patch of concrete to ensure we had a decent position for then lunchtime parade, we had a prime position to watch is all go by. The Disneyland parades are however very well done, and well worth the hypothermia that I sustained in my lower extremities.

With cramped legs and frozen buttocks, we wandered up to the child focussed area of the park, along with a few thousand other people, most of them schoolkids, to let the girls have a few rides. Isabelle loved the attractions, and the bigger girls had a turn on a rollercoaster, which I got the impression wasn't quite as fun as it was a few years ago.
On the way around we grabbed a Fastpass to Winnie the Pooh's Hunny Hunt ride, just to see what the fuss was about. This ride constantly had massive queues, and insane wait times, and according to all reports I've read, is supposed to be one of the better rides in the park.

Onto the Roger Rabbit ride, which scared the hell out of Isabelle. She now doesn't like weazels apparently. Emerging from the ride, in an already fragile state, she'd just calmed down when one of the 3 little pigs came up to her and tried to get her attention. She wasn't expecting it, and it scared her half to death. She screamed, cried and ran like hell, and hid. The poor pig was mortified, and since they can't talk, he did his (or her) best to apologise by making cuddling jestures and blowing kisses, but the damage was done. Isabelle wouldn't come out of her hiding spot until the bad pig was gone, which made for great entertainment for the crowd which had formed around the spectacle.

We then made our way to another ride that Charlotte wanted to go on, the wild west rollercoaster, and found that unsurprisingly the fastpasses for this ride were all gone, and the wait time was 75 minutes. Out of the question then. I offered to stand with the girls, but they, like me, just can't justify standing around that long for a 3 minute ride.

With no time to fit anything else in, we waited for our Winnie the Pooh ride Fastpasses to fall due, and went on that ride. Good, but not great, and I don't know that a great deal was lost in translation. It was just a cutsie kids ride. I'm not entirely sure what all the fuss is about, and with adults waiting 90 minutes to ride, I just don't get it.

With dusk quickly rolling in, it was time again to get a decent position to wait for the night time electric light parade. Since the light parade was going to be finished by 6:20pm, and the park closes at 7pm, we figured that we'd have time to queue for a ride or two before closing. We were mistaken.

After the electric light parade we went straight to Space Mountain, to find the attendant closing the ride. At 6:34pm! When we and another group asked whether she could make an exception, since we'd missed it by literally seconds, "No! Closed! Sorry." was the response we got. Similar story on the less popular rocketship ride. Closing. Sorry. The morale to the story? When the park closes at 7pm, you can elect to watch the electric light parade, or line up for one last ride. Make a choice, because you cannot do both.

For some reason the V8 racing cars ride stayed open till right on 7pm, so we were able to have a few rides on that before it closed, so it was some solace at the end of, what was honestly a fairly disappointing day by Disney standards.

In hindsight, would we have skipped Disneyland altogether, or just run like idiots at the opening to get a Space Mountain fastpass? Not sure, but I know that if and when we're here next time, if Disneyland has a 7pm closing time advertised next time, we won't be bothering to go.