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End of our trip to Japan

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We returned home after almost 3 weeks in Japan, visiting Tokyo, Kyoto, Osaka, Himeji. It will take some time to post my experiences in the land of the rising sun, in reverse chronological order. Will also cover my month long trip in Italy back in May/June; that may take a while to complete. To start, these are the luggage covers I bought from a Mega Don Quixote in Tokyo. We got covers only for the new suitcases that we checked in for the flight back to the US. The medium one was bought in Kyoto, the large in Tokyo as we, i.e. my daughter, accumulated more purchases. Sure made it easy to find the cases in the luggage claim area! Will describe Don Quixote a bit more in a separate post about shopping in Japan which we did a lot of! I decided to stay at the Hotel Villa Fontaine Grand Haneda Airport, to make sure that we did not miss our morning flight. This was a very nice and modern hotel located in the Haneda Airport Garden, right past the new shopping arcade. Easy access to the c
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DisneySea, Tokyo

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We spent most of the day at DisneySea. It was cloudy but still humid. We were curious about this Disney park, available only in Japan (found out later that the Japanese parks were not part of Disney, but under license to use the name and characters/images). Bought tickets from home about a month ago, using the Klook app. A new attraction in the park, Fantasy Springs, opened recently and we hoped to get passes to that. Those free passes were only available through the Disney Resort app after admission into the main park itself. I have read that passes to popular attractions and rides are gone very early as many people arrive 1-2 hours before the official opening time, and the park lets visitors in before the official opening time. We simply could not get up early enough to line up at the entrance. Also, unlike Universal Studios Japan where our hotel was just steps from the entrance, we had to take the hotel shuttle and the Disney monorail to this park. Sure enough, once we got in, a big
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Tokyo Disneyland

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Unlike Universal Studios Japan, we just could not get up early enough to queue up at the Tokyo Disneyland entrance to try to beat the crowds and get priority passes to top attractions and rides. Instead, we had a late breakfast at the hotel, then took the free shuttle to Disneyland. On the bright side, we avoided the breakfast crowd and long lines waiting for the shuttle. It was another sunny, hot and humid day in Tokyo. After arriving at about 10:30 am, we went to the visitor center to figure out the Disney Resort app to sign up for priority passes. The staff spoke very little English, but we managed to understand each other. Some of the rides, like the highly recommended Enchanted Tale of Beauty and Beast ride, could only be obtained by paying for premium passes, at 2,000 yen per person, which we did for the available time slot of 6:45 pm. We also managed to sign up for Big Thunder Mountain ride using the free 40th anniversary pass. A few rides, like It's a Small World and S
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Shopping in Tokyo

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I have scheduled shopping in the Nippori Fabric Town three days before we depart from Tokyo, thinking this will give us time to pack our suitcases and get them transferred to the airport by a third party so we did not have lug them on the trains. Turned out we needed to revise our plans. Today was a public holiday in Japan, Sports Day and the main fabric store we wanted to visit, Tomato, was closed. Instead, we had to settle for other stores that were opened. Our room came with breakfast; the buffet was very nice, a mix of Western and Japanese dishes. Since we slept in, there were not too many people in the restaurant. After breakfast, we took the hotel's shuttle to the Maihama station, and got on the local train to Niporri. We spent a lot of time looking a fabric. I was going for Japanese prints, 100% cotton for quilting projects. Laurel found small pieces as souvenirs for members of her crafting club. We found some fantastic bargains, in fact most things were bargains
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