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I visited DisneySea for the first time! Mum, Emma, John and I stayed at the Hyatt Regency Tokyo Bay on Saturday night and then Emma and I went to DisneySea on Sunday while Mum and John visited the Sheraton Hotel and took advantage of its kid-oriented activities (John’s not a big fan of theme parks at this stage). Overall, I was pretty impressed with DisneySea. The way they had distinct ‘lands’ that nevertheless had some water-related aspect to them was well done. While a decent number of the rides were largely just reskinned versions of rides from Disneyland, they were still fun.
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The one aspect that was a genuine disappointment was their IT backend. The big new attraction is the addition of Fantasy Springs. This is a new land that includes rides relating to Peter Pan, Rapunzel and (the big one) Frozen. To avoid having the entire area be crushed, they’ve gated Fantasy Springs such that you can’t get inside unless you have booked at least a standby booking for one of the rides. You do this through the Disney Resort app and you will be shocked to hear, dear reader, that this app barely worked. I was fortunately able to make one booking (for Peter Pan’s Never Land) so we did get in but after that, the app kept failing to work and I wasn’t able to do anything else with it. Fortunately, that wasn’t too big an impediment and Emma and I still had a great time. I’m already keen to go back (even if the multiple times we went on Flounder’s Flying Fish Coaster appears to have given me a mild crick in the neck).
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On Saturday night, rather than go to the fancy restaurants in the Hyatt, we instead caught the shuttle bus to Disneyland and went to Chef Mickey in the Disney Ambassador Hotel. The buffet food wasn’t anything to write home (blog?) about but the kids had a blast at the end of the meal when a performer dressed up as Mickey Mouse came around to the table and posed for a bunch of photos.
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As you can probably imagine, with the combination of a buffet dinner, a buffer breakfast and a lot of in-park popcorn, I put the dieting to one side for most of the weekend. My weight went back up over 70kg but has already dropped back to 69kg.
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Yes, it’s that time of year: I wrote something on my blog! It’s my seventh annual list of podcasts I listen to. I probably wrote about this last year but it kills me that the title for this series ends in a preposition. If I did write about this last year, I no doubt noted that I keep wondering how stupid it would be to rename the series to ‘Podcast to Which I Listen’ before concluding each time that it would be far too stupid.
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Perhaps because of the post, I promptly listened to a lot fewer episodes this week and instead started listening to audiobooks again (!). Rather than sign up for a subscription, I bought the audio book of Walter Isaacson’s Elon Musk (which I’m partway through reading on the Kindle) and started listening to it. Maybe there won’t be a list of podcasts next year?
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I’m so out of the loop when it comes to contemporary music, I have no idea how popular Beabadoobee is but I was listening to her 2022 album, Beatopia, and immediately took a liking to ‘The Perfect Pair’ (Apple Music).
