Japan Day 8+9+10. Homebound.

Finally, the final post of the Japan trip. As mentioned, I'll just throw Tokyo Disneyland in here as there's nothing much. Enough said, onto the photos.

Day 8: Tokyo Disneyland.

Once past the main entrance into the "Welcome Zone".

Random photo. The grass-crafted dragon is cute.

Cinderella's Castle.

Castle with fireworks in the background.

Day 9: Shinjuku + final shopping.Went to the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building in Shinjuku area. Had heard the view from the observation deck in these buildings were better than Tokyo Tower.

View from the South Observatory.

Another view from up there. Definitely felt it was better than Tokyo Tower, and with an admission fee of FREE, it's worth the trip. Spotted a flea market within the area, but didn't visit it due to time constraint...

As we were headed to the Square Enix Building! By request of my friend. It was here where I bought my plushie Chocobo ^^.

Enjoying the night air @ the rooftop of our hostel while having some snacks like Calamari and Yakitori with Hokkaido fresh milk and fruit juice. We're actually not allowed up on the roof after 9pm (Timestamp of photo is 9.30pm, and we stayed till like 10+ since it was our last night), but as our room had a "secret" access to the stairs even after the roof access door was locked, we could go up (secretly of course!). The river you see in the background is the Sumida River.

Day 10: Sayonara Japan....

I don't think I've said before, but we were staying at Khaosan Tokyo Original Guest Hostel located in the district of Asakusa. For 2,500 yen a night, it was cheap and reasonable. Only thing was the smallness of the room as you can see from the photo.

And our "secret" access to the rooftop stairs. All we had to do was open our windows and squeeze through the small gap between the stairs and the wall and roofbound we go! And yes we had the Sumida River as our daily morning view ^^.

For our return flight from Japan to Singapore, we sat SIA's A380. We were on the upper deck for this trip.

The interior is nice! Everything's new! The tv screens were also bigger, and quite comfortable seats.

Another shot of the economy class cabin.And another shot. The business class cabin is near godlike but didn't managed to take a photo of it sadly. I wonder about the suites too...

Final goodbyes to Narita, and I was homebound... *insert crying here*

Love the cloud formations.

That's it for my Japan photos. A great trip nevertheless, but I don't think I want to spend another 10 days in Tokyo again (for a holiday that is), would want to visit other locations, especially the whole of Hokkaido ^^. Hope you had enjoyed all the photos, and I'll be back to normal postings. Will be attending Cosfest tomorrow too, so there'll definitely be an entry on that with cosplayer's photos. Stay tuned and Signing out.

Japan Day 7: Tokyo DisneySea.

A slightly different format from my other posts; rather than lots of photos, I'll be posting videos of the show performances from Tokyo DisneySea (Not my videos though, but searched from youtube from others). There still will be photos, but not much.

The first thing you'll see once entering DisneySea.

Band performance welcoming everybody to the place. The lady with the sax is not too bad looking too.

Upon entering the main area, we saw lots of people sitting/standing around, and we were wondering what was the crowd waiting for, which turned out to be the show performance "Primavera: Springtime Sea". I'll come to that later in the post.

Random scenery shot. Felt like we're in Venice, Italy.

The only ride I actually enjoyed in both DisneySea/Land. The Tower of Terror. It's a free fall ride, and I sat it 3 times! The 4th time I wanted to sit before the park closed, they had some system error >.<" Bad Tiki! (We nicknamed the "statue" in the ride Tiki, which is some "cursed" ritual idol.)

Random photo of a Micky statue.

More random photo. If only I could change that "cargo light" to a moe~ figurine, it'll be perfect!

Some fountain with an Aladdin theme. The genie styled water-shooters (I don't know what they're actually called lol) are cute! Every different one had different facial expressions.

I have no idea this sub came from which Disney story, but it looked nice so here's a shot.

Overview of the main area (or at least the entrance to the main part of the park). See the number of people along the waterfront? They're all waiting for the show to start. People queue/wait/book places like 2 hours (there's one parade in Disneyland, people were already waiting 4-5 hours before it) before the actual showtime. Hardcore fans -.-"

We watched both daily performance of "Primavera: Springtime Sea", and snapped lots of photos. This is where I would rather have a good videocam though, in order to capture the whole show in action. A camera just doesn't do it justice. At least there are many others who did have a videocam, and surely someone would have posted on youtube, so I searched them out and here you have them!

A good edited copy of the show, but it's not the full complete performance sadly.

I believe this would be a good presentation of what we saw, as we were at the same area as this person (for the morning performance). Part 1.

Part 2.

Part 3.

Seems like the love for Disney is strong with this little one. She was dancing along to the songs, with the same dance routine as the performers (she actually memorized? amazing). Those around her cheering her on too. Really really cute.

And during the afternoon performance, I spotted this guy at the top of a building, also dancing along to the songs with same dance routine. Heck, nearly 30% (estimate) of the audience WERE dancing along to the entire show with its dance routine!! Real big fans of Disney I guess.

This night show performance is called "BraviSEAmo!". We arrived late for this show though, as we were having our dinner just before, so we missed out the first part (we didn't even know of this show till we went to the main area for the fireworks and saw it). I really enjoyed the pyrotechnics used in this performance.

Cheers for others with videocams! I can rewatch it from the comfort of home.

Another shot of the show. Sadly, due to bad weather conditions, the fireworks show we were waiting for, that was supposed to happen after this show, was canceled.

Overall, it was a good experience to visit DisneySea, something new to me, as I've been to the Anaheim's Disneyland in the US before back in 1996. But seriously... the rides were boring!! (Besides Bad Tiki) And the cost of entry to the place is also not cheap, @ 5,800 yen for a day visit, or 10,000 yen for a 2 day pass. I'll definitely not return to this place, unless I have no choice (GF maybe?), or someone is paying for me (family trip). At least the show performances, Primavera and BraviSEAmo, were very enjoyable. Anyway, next post will be on Disneyland, but that was a letdown so don't expect much. Signing out.

Japan Day 4+5+6: Various Locations.

Will be combining 3 days photos, but didn't take much photos on these days anyway. On to the photos!!

Day 4: Tsukiji + Imperial Gardens + Yasukuni Shrine + Nakano + Ueno.

It seems that Bandai's main building is in the Asakusa area, spotted it while walking towards Kuramae Station.Tsukiji is crazy!!! The amount of traffic is madness!! We didn't see the tuna auctions, but after seeing the craziness even if it's not during its peak hour, we believe we had made the correct decision of not coming early. We didn't take a walk inside the main market but only on the outskirts, but that was enough. I was never fond of mayhem. Still had a sushi breakfast and it was good... Want more ootoro!!

After Tsukiji, we walked towards the Tokyo Imperial Palace, heading towards the Imperial East Gardens, enroute through Ginza. Out of Ginza area, and just before reaching the palace, these huge plains of grass and trees makes it a very nice place to just hang out and relax.They might even be good places to do some figurine photo-shoots too!! Love the emptiness.

Guard Tower?? Random photo. Love doing those water reflection photos.

Within the East Gardens, there are smaller gardens where they have flowers and trees (they're labeled with their names too). Lovely flowers especially, and spotted lots of other photographers taking photos of the flowers. There were also groups of environmentalist(?) or plant-lovers doing some "study" of the flora (more like going "O.O what is this? Adds to note book.")

More empty plains, perfect for picnics.

Once done with the East Gardens, we then walked to Yasukuni Shrine, the controversy shrine behind bad relations between China and Japan, mainly due to having enshrined 14 A-Class War Criminals and having high-ranking Japanese Officials (Junichiro Koizumi mainly) paying their respects at this shrine. I couldn't hold my laughter though, when I saw one of the ema plaques having someone wrote on it "Free Tibet!". Surely looking for trouble I guess.An actual Zero-sen (repaired reassembled from various crashed/incompleted Zeros after the war) being displayed in their museum. My favourite WWII aircraft too! I was going "OMG ZERO SHIKI! WOOT!" when I saw this.This trip wasn't planned, but due to the huge amount of extra time which we had, having cleared the various locations before hand at a much faster speed than I had expected, my friend decided to let me go Nakano, to Nakano Broadway. Treasures I definitely found there; my Nendoroid Petit Lucky☆Star Set @ 7,000 yen (no where else had!! And buying it from La Tendo back in SG is crazily expensive), and Nendo Miku at a "cheaper" price (yes Fariz your Miku came from here) of 4,200 yen (The next cheapest I found at Akiba was 4,500 yen).

Day 5: Harajuku + Shibuya + Shinjuku.

Love the 2nd from left dress. Cute! Comes with a Nekomimi hood too!

We met up with another friend who was in Japan at the same time as us, but her trip was for 17 days. Anyway, this wasn't a day for me, but mainly for my friends, as they went on their clothes shopping sprees..... Even though I was going "Yep no problem I'm okay with shopping", but truthfully, I was bored to death. Yes I may have found clothes that I liked (and wanted to buy), but like my vest... It's all tooooooo expensive for me!! The only time I enjoyed myself, was the Karaoke!! Sang quite a few songs: Hirai Ken - Canvas + Hitomi wo Tojite; B'z - Ocean (Umizaru rocks! my no.1 favourite Jdrama, need to do a review on it one day); Haruhi - Hare Hare Yukai + God Knows (I didn't choose these songs, but it seemed another one of the guys from my other friend's group is a Haruhi fan, so yea we both sang it together! and we rocked!!); KOTOKO - Snow Angel; Maaya Sakamoto - Loop; doriko - Uta ni Katachi wa Nai Keredo (I can't believe I actually found this Miku song!! Too bad couldn't find any other Miku songs... I would have rocked on them all!).

Seems like I could only remember these few songs, but not that we could sing alot too, since we only had 2 hours, and 4 of us were trying to hog the system/mic lol. I've attached youtube links to the song names too, in case you want to listen to them. Aaaahhh can't wait to go to the Singapore's Japanese Karaoke so I can rock again! But no more high-pitched songs for me though, I couldn't handle Hirai Ken's songs truthfully, neither could do so for KOTOKO.

Day 6: Akihabara + Odaiba.

The Rainbow Bridge in Sunset, along Odaiba Seaside Park.

This day was supposed to be going to Tokyo Disneyland, but because it was raining, and not knowing where else to go, we decided to just enjoy walking in the rain, and headed to Akiba to do abit of MY shopping in the morning/early afternoon. But late afternoon (about 4pm) the rain stopped, in which we headed to the futuristic island of Odaiba.

View of the Odaiba Seaside Park, a small beach area.

We also took a side trip to New York to visit the Statue of Liberty. OR at least it got "Teleported" here.

I was actually making fun of the naming of this subway station in my previous trip (and abit of referencing to the above comment), about being a "teleport" station and such, but at least it does look futuristic from the outside(?). Anyway, "Beam me up, Scotty!" ^^

The sunset looks so beautiful.

Random photo while enroute to Palette Town.

Inside the Partire Tokyo Bay Wedding Village. A place for those couples in Japan who wants a western styled wedding in Tokyo. Anyway, we got chased out by security after taking this shot though LOL. Guess we're not allowed in there. It was fine the last time I came though, maybe the guard was having PMS. The ferris wheel at Palette Town.Walked back to Odaiba Seaside Park for some night photography. The jetty you see is where you'll arrive at when you take the waterbus from Asakusa/Hinode Pier to Odaiba.
And 1 more shot of the Rainbow Bridge in it's beauty at night. You can also see the orange-lighted up Tokyo Tower in the background to the right of the bridge.

That's it for the 3 days, and I'm thinking of doing a combined Day 7+8 post too, since it's just Disneyland + DisneySea; Will confirm after sorting photos. As to why I didn't do a post yesterday, and most likely including tomorrow, is because I went to my friend's house for gym + swimming, and mass Guitar Hero III on his Xbox 360!! That game is fun!! Even though I can only managed up till medium difficulty, and hard just kills me. Can't wait for Guitar Hero: World Tour!! The mic is mine!! Tomorrow will be going to his place again, so I don't know if I got the will to do a post. Oh well... Signing out for now.