02/20-03/05 | Tokyo, Osaka

Dates: 20/02/2023 - 05/03/2023

Primary points of interest: Tokyo Disneyland, DisneySea, Universal Studios Japan

Hotels: Hilton Tokyo Bay, The Singulari Hotel & Skyspa

Day 1

Arrived a few hours early to visit the newly renovated Delta Sky Club located between terminal two and three at LAX. It's a fantastic lounge with a great outdoor patio where you can take in all of the plane exhaust. The flight to HND went smoothly and felt quit short, but that was probably thanks to our upgraded Premium Select seats. Those things are pretty dang comfortable.

Japan had just re-opened and still had a vaccine mandate in effect but the entire process was fairly straight forward, everything was done in advanced on their website. Took maybe thirty minutes to get through immigration and bag claim. This allowed us to take an earlier Airport Limousine bus than we had planned. Only waited about fifteen minutes for that. I highly recommend taking the Limousine bus, it's dirt cheap and takes you right to Tokyo Disneyland area hotels (and other places if you're staying elsewhere).

Arrived at Hilton Tokyo Bay, checked in, dropped bags in our rooms and went right to the Bayside monorail stop for some food at Ikspiari. Walked around for a while until deciding to have our first meal at the most authentic Japanese food restaurant ever, Guzman y Gomez 🤣. Food was decent! This place gets busy when the parks close as we found out later.

After dinner we did some light shopping at the Disney Store and laughed at how much Epcot merchandise they had. For context, this was around the time Disneyland in the states was also offloading Epcot and other Walt Disney World goods. Im assuming it was more of a marketing ploy though, they had Epcot promotional pamphlets right next to it. Still strange. One thing that did stand out was how much cheaper everything was. Even if the exchange rate was at pre-pandemic levels it would be a bargain.

Left and finally went to bed. Didn't wake up in the middle of the night and avoided jetlag by picking a correctly timed flight and not sleeping on the plane. Seriously folks, it's not that hard if you're smart about it, don't try to shift your sleep around before, it wont work.