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Old 12 Jan 20, 08:04 PM  
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Gr8WideSomewher
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When you gachapon a star: Tokyo Disney and Japan 2019 - Day 9

Hey chums, told you I'd be back soon

Day 9: Move to Universal Studios, Osaka, featuring the USJ nighttime parade

On Monday we woke with the alarm at 7:45. We showered, threw the last few bits into our suitcases and then squeezed into the elevator to go down to the lobby. We had been planning to walk to Tokyo Station (it was only 10-15 minutes from our hotel) but once down there, we saw that it was absolutely weeing it down! We didn’t fancy the walk in the rain with our suitcases, so asked the guy at the front desk to call us a taxi. He seemed to think this was a bit mental but did as we asked.

The taxi took about 10 minutes and cost 1050 yen(ish) (£7.33). Obviously, this was quite expensive, but definitely worth it, as we arrived dry and unruffled. Well, as unruffled as you can be when you are moving hotel again for the third time in nine days, are about to see your third Japanese city, are carrying over 25 kilos of luggage with you and can barely walk. So yeah…worth it.

We had the usual panic trying to find the right platform, but eventually did. We would be travelling on the Shinkansen Hikari train. This isn’t the fastest train (which is called Nozomi) but was compatible with our Japan Rail Pass. We arrived 10 minutes early for the train, which was leaving at 9:30, so Bex went to grab some drinks and a packet of waffles for breakfast, while I got on the train and found spots for our suitcases. I was one of the first people on, and I’m glad I was, because the space for suitcases filled up very quickly. Once I’d found spots for the suitcases I hovered by the door, probably getting in people’s way, because I was nervous that Bex wouldn’t make it.

She did however and the three-hour train journey was very peaceful. I listened to my audiobook and Bex edited photos.






We arrived in Shin-Osaka Station with no problems, but the next leg of our journey was a bit more difficult. We’d thought it was going to be only one train to Universal Studios Japan, but it ended up being two separate trains. Each time we had difficulty finding the right platform and both of us were having suitcase issues.

None of that seemed to matter, however, when we finally arrived at Universal City Walk at 13:20. Even on the edge of USJ the atmosphere was very exciting, and it was a very short walk from the station to our hotel, Hotel Universal Port. Bex had warned me that the hotel we were staying at was going to be ‘Quite Minionsy’, which turned out to be an understatement.



I think the hotel must have originally been film-set themed as there were a few displays left over that gave that impression, but it had since been thoroughly Minions-ified.




Apparently Japanese people adore the Minions as there is a big section in the park dedicated to them as well. There were big Minions displays all over the lobby of the hotel, the décor was all Minions colours and they even pumped the smell of bananas into the lobby.



I am not the biggest fan of Minions, unfortunately. I find the Despicable Me films pretty good, but because of Gru and the girls, not the Minions, who I find a bit annoying. I certainly didn’t mind this, however, as the hotel was pretty luxurious, and would make a nice change from the pencil-case that we’d been sleeping in in Tokyo. As usual, we weren’t allowed into our rooms, as it was still too early, so we left our suitcases, used the loo, and wandered out to City Walk for some lunch.

Just to explain, we had a day-and-a-half ticket for USJ, which was why we were arriving in the middle of the day. We could enter the park at 15:00 and spend the rest of the afternoon and evening there, and then had a full day the following day as well. We would be at the Minions hotel for two nights, before moving on to Kyoto. The 1.5 day ticket for USJ cost about £91 and we bought it through the Voyagin website. We also looked up which dates were likely to be very busy on TDR Explorer’s website and chose these two days as neither of them was supposed to be too busy. We actually used this website a lot, especially for theme park-related things. I think we even emailed him a question at one point, and he got straight back to us.




Most of the options in City Walk were for Western food, and of course, they were all really expensive. We settled on TGI’s because it’s one of Bex’s favourites.



Bex insisted that we share a meal for lunch, as she wasn’t very hungry. I was hungry, so this annoyed me quite a bit, and I was very pissy with Bex. We ordered chicken tacos, which came to 850 yen (£5.94). With two cokes the total was 1200 yen (£8.38), which really wasn’t bad considering how expensive everything was.



The food was pretty good, but as I said, I could have eaten twice as much! We also spoke to our mum for a bit, who was still in Tanzania for work. She gave us a long list of all the animals she was seeing on safari and we told her a bit about what we’d been doing, but unfortunately, the line wasn’t very good.

We finished lunch about 14:45 and wandered through City Walk to the park entrance.



On the way, we downloaded the USJ app, so we could see wait times for the rides. Luckily this worked pretty well – the wait times were pretty accurate, and it updated fairly quickly.




As it was the middle of the afternoon, the queue to get into the park wasn’t very long, and we were soon in.



There may be a slight lack of pictures for the next few bits, as of course we were hitting the rides and hitting them hard! Anyone who has read my other trippies will know of our love for all things Potter, so naturally, our first stop was going to be Hogwarts!




How nice that the weather seemed to be mimicking Scotland. Nice to have an authentic experience

The Hogsmeade area at USJ is really nicely separated from the rest of the park. You have to walk through a wood where there are Scottish-style standing stones and cool sound effects in order to get to the village. The village itself looked exactly like the one in Florida (the only other one I’ve been to) and of course, is beautiful.






We run-walked to Hogwarts to ride Forbidden Journey, where the posted wait time was 50 minutes. We decided that was totally worth it and joined the queue. The ride seemed to have gone tech, as the queue didn’t move for a while, but once it did move, we were inside very quickly. We only waited about 10 minutes outside in total and then entered through the front of the castle, rather than the back.



Inside it was the usual smelly, disorganised crush in the lockers area. We found a locker and put our stuff in. The lockers operated with keys rather than codes, as in Florida, so you didn’t have to remember your locker number.

After leaving the locker room, we queued for another 10 minutes before we were on the ride. The queue was constantly moving though, and of course, that part of the queue goes through the castle, setting up the story of the ride, and is so cool that you almost wish it would go more slowly.

The ride itself was completely awesome! It wasn’t exactly the same as the Florida one, being a little bit scarier in places. There were definitely more dementors, some of which got right up in your face, and more spiders too. I have read that JK Rowling requested the scares be toned down a bit when she first experienced the ride in Florida, as she was worried it wouldn’t be suitable for younger children, so maybe the USJ version is more like the original. Anyway, it’s even better than the Florida one.


The weather was cheering up at last!

When we were done we ran round to ride again. This time we waited only 15 minutes in total, even with the locker room. We also switched positions on the ride bench, so we could experience the ride from a different seat.

We stopped briefly in Filch’s Emporium on the way out and spotted some stuff we might want to go back for later. There were some cool chocolate boxes and mugs, along with the usual cuddly toys and Hogwarts sweatshirts.

After that, we wandered out of Hogwarts and out into the rest of the park.





The other ride we were determined to try and ride that day was the Jaws ride. We are both fans of Jaws, especially Bex, and had seen ride-throughs and read stuff about the version of the ride that used to be in Universal Studios Florida, so we were very excited.






The Amity area is great – really well-themed, with lots of witty little bits and pieces to enjoy. The posted wait for the Jaws ride was 25 minutes, so we joined the queue. The theming of the queue was really cute – very 70s, with a funny old-school video advertising holidays in Amity. The posted wait was probably about right, though it could have been a bit shorter.



The ride itself was fantastic! It was possibly the cheesiest ride I’ve ever done and I loved every minute of it. Bex didn’t want to sit on the outside of the boat because she is very afraid of sharks (while at the same time being fascinated by them ) so I sat on the outside seat. This meant I got excellent views of the brilliant animatronics and got the best of the water and fire effects. It was an excellent ride and our ‘skipper’ was really enjoying herself. Of course, she was speaking Japanese so I’ve no idea what she was saying, but she took care of the shark for us, so it was all good!







It was now 17:00 and we walked into the neighbouring Jurassic Park area. This area is better than the Jurassic Park bit in Florida. It’s a bit more extensive and there is added streetmosphere that brings it to life.


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Old 12 Jan 20, 08:05 PM  
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Part 2

For example, today there was a life-size stegosaurus, raptor, triceratops and (best of all) triceratops baby parading around the area. They were getting up in people’s faces and letting kids stroke them – it was very cute. Little touches like that made this park feel really special.








As the dinos were leaving, a tiny little boy, whose mum was not watching him very carefully, bounded forward to stroke the stegosaurus’s back leg and then was, of course, knocked flying by its big, horny tail. A CM was there in a flash, and pretty much caught the kid before he fell, but he learned a valuable lesson that day about dinosaurs and their peripheral vision. The mum looked like she was going to kick up a fuss, but it was pretty much entirely her fault. The CMs had been warning people to keep back and had been very vigilant, and we’d all observed her messing about on her phone while the kid approached the dinosaur. People are the worst.

Of course, being in Jurassic Park it would have been rude not to do the water ride. It was a 35 minute posted wait and we waited for about 30. The ride is the same as the Florida one, which is to say awesome! That drop at the end of the ride with the T-rex looming over you will never not be excellent.




After that we single-ridered the ride, but ended up in the same boat anyway. Bex was in the row in front of me and got talking to a sweet Australian lady who was having an amazing time on holiday with her sons. I got eaten alive by mosquitos. Oh well, maybe they’ll be able to clone me in a few million years’ time! I also got extremely wet on this occasion – the back row was not a good option.

I was determined to do the other big ride in Jurassic Park – the Flying Dinosaur. They don’t have this one in Florida, but it’s a coaster with big drops and several upside down bits. Bex said she wasn’t going on it (no way no how) but was happy to wait for me. The queue looked really long at that moment though, even for single rider, so I said I’d try another time. Little did I know that the wait times we were experiencing today were very short by USJ standards, and that Flying Dinosaur was one of the most popular rides in the park!



We checked the app and saw that another attraction we hadn’t experienced before, the Backdraft attraction, was due to start at 18:20. So we walked to the entrance and started queuing at 18:05 – we were some of the first people.



Backdraft is one of those attractions where you stand in rooms and they tell you about movie visual effects and then you ‘take part in the movie’, by watching some visual effects come to life. Like Armageddon at DLP except not shi*t. The movie Backdraft (which I have never seen and would be willing to bet most people haven’t) is about fire (or firefighters or something), so we got to learn about fire effects. As far as these attractions go, Backdraft was actually really good. The first room was a bit boring, but in the second room they basically set the whole building on fire, exploded things all over the room and included some surprise room-shakes to make you feel like the walkway you were standing on was coming down. It was cool – I’d recommend it.

We wanted to get really good spots for the parade that evening, and our experience in Disney had taught us to get there really early. So we walked to the New York area and took seats on the grass by the path where the parade would be happening.





This was an area called Gramercy Park and was suggested to us by a CM. There were a few people who had done the same thing, so we felt we’d made the right decision and settled in to wait until 20:05 when the parade was due to happen.



Bex got us some cokes while I waited in our spot. And waited. And waited. We certainly didn’t need to get there as early as we did on that occasion. Compared to the following day, the park really wasn’t crowded at all that day, and we could have found good spots for the parade later on. Plus it threatened rain the entire time we were sitting there. It didn’t actually rain, at least not much, but we were worried the entire time that the parade would be cancelled.



It got darker.



When the parade did start, however, our spot turned out to be perfect! We could see the parade going by at the top of the street and then had about a 15 minute wait until it went directly by where we were sitting. And this parade, y’all! It was possibly the best parade we’d ever seen! The floats were all huge and brilliantly designed, with technical effects and characters all over them.

Photo dump alert!

There were floats for Harry Potter (including the Room of Requirement with lots of wizards duelling, a flippin Quidditch pitch and best of all a full size Hogwarts Express engine!), Transformers, Jurassic Park and, of course, Despicable Me.








Each franchise had several floats devoted to it and they were all ginormous and colourful. I filmed the Harry Potter section so I could send it to Jeannie and then snapped as many pictures of the rest of it as I could. The actors and dancers were all giving 100%, whether they were playing wizards or velociraptors!

Of course, the Harry Potter floats were our favourites, but we also loved the Transformers.

















This one actually transformed from a truck into a robot!

They were very impressive technically and really witty and fun too. All of the floats had little stories going on for you to enjoy as they went by – for example, the HP floats had wizards duelling and the Jurassic Park one had raptors escaping their enclosure and running into the crowd. Some of it was even a bit scary, meaning you got even more caught up in it.







And the floats weren’t all! The reason our spot was so brilliant was that it was a great place to see the projections, which were on the walls behind the floats as they went by. These were really good and added to the atmosphere of each set of floats. I especially loved the Jurassic Park ones, which included a T-rex poking it’s head out and roaring.





It was a seriously good parade and we loved every minute of it – even the Minions.





Edited at 09:58 PM.
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Old 12 Jan 20, 08:05 PM  
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Part 3

Afterwards, the park was closing, and it was definitely time for us to find some food. We felt like we’d done loads, even with the long wait for the parade, but were very excited to have another day.



We ended up at the Hard Rock Café. I know, I know, its basically a more expensive TGI’s, and man was it expensive, but we were too tired to look for anything else. Plus, we both fancied some Western food (by which I mean chips!).

We ordered two burgers and the bill came to 5179 yen (£36.18) including service charge and tax. Nearly 40 quid for two burgers! We didn’t even have drinks because we’d already had loads of coke that day. It was also the first time we’d seen tax listed separately on the bill – this felt a bit American and naughty.



Having said all this, the burgers were really good and we were both much too tired and hungry to care at that point. My main memories of that evening are of a fabulous parade followed by a very satisfying burger, so the money didn’t really worry us in the end.




After tea we went back to the Minions hotel and went up to our room. Luckily the room had no Minions theming and was possibly the prettiest hotel room of our whole holiday. It was also huge! We had a great view of the park too. Basically, we loved everything about the room and spent an hour luxuriating and having much-needed showers before heading to bed at 23:30.





It had been an incredible day!

Lots of love, folks - see you next time! X

Edited at 09:43 PM.
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Old 12 Jan 20, 10:48 PM  
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A brilliant day! I love all your parade pics and i’m sorry to say but that Minion themed hotel is my idea of heaven!
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Old 13 Jan 20, 05:46 AM  
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Wowsa!
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Old 25 Jan 20, 06:07 PM  
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Fantastic day 😊I’m planning my trip to Osaka as DS who will be 12 then is desperate to get to USJ for Nintendo world. I was debating whether to do 3 nights off site and travel in as it’s only 30 minutes. But, with the night parades, staying on site means I don’t have to worry. Great day
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Old 27 Jan 20, 02:46 PM  
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Originally Posted by happytraveller View Post
Fantastic day 😊I’m planning my trip to Osaka as DS who will be 12 then is desperate to get to USJ for Nintendo world. I was debating whether to do 3 nights off site and travel in as it’s only 30 minutes. But, with the night parades, staying on site means I don’t have to worry. Great day
Thanks for reading! Yes I'd highly recommend staying onsite. Our hotel was really good value and literally two minutes from the park. And that nighttime parade is not to be missed!
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Old 3 Feb 20, 10:37 PM  
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Wow what a day!
Thank you so much for such a detailed trip report, frantically making notes 😊
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Old 9 Feb 20, 04:38 PM  
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Originally Posted by Tinkermom View Post
Wow what a day!
Thank you so much for such a detailed trip report, frantically making notes 😊
You're very welcome - if you want any more details on anything give me a shout. Thanks for reading
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Old 22 Feb 20, 08:49 PM  
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Fab day! Really enjoyed reading about your day. Which is your favourite park? Orlando or Osaka? I'm off to read the next installment!

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