Japan 2023, first full day, 5/31/23

I slept some, Mike slept a little more. The room was very comfortable and the bidet made our home bidet look like something from the stone age. the seat even raises by itself when you walk into the bathroom. All these years I’ve been raising the seat by myself like a sucker.

We found the Shenkensen train platform and found a little shop that sold ekiben, bento boxes that you eat while on the bullet train. (eating on most trains is considered rude but long trips or bullet trains are the social exception.)

Inside was sort of a sticky rice with little dumplings, a small piece of chicken and some other little tasty tidbits. Mike got a karage ekiben that had some yummy chicken and rice. It felt very “Japanesey” to be eating one of these on the train to Osaka. Plus the green tea.

The Shinkensen train and a few local trains got us to the front desk of our hotel, The Park Front Hotel, at 10am.

Jet lag had me to sleep by 10:30am while Mike went on an adventure to find some allergy medication. I woke up at 12:30pm worried that Mike wasn’t back yet. Turns out he had come and gone and I slept through it. Oh, jet lag.

We grabbed a bite of lunch before heading into Universal Studios, Osaka at 3pm. Lunch was so good!

USJ is a clean cute little theme park and while it was pretty crowded it didn’t seem too crowded. Our half day park ticket had us there from 3pm until park closing at 7pm.

This park has two really popular properties right now, Harry Potter and Nintendo each of which have their own “lands.” We first made our way to Hogsmeade (the Harry Potter land.)

There we rode The Forbidden Journey of Harry Potter. We rode this in Florida back in 2012 and really enjoyed it. The dark ride smoothly flies you through a combination of practical and projected scenes all around Hogwarts Castle. It’s a remarkable piece of technology though some of the projected scenes are beginning to show their age.

There are multiple motion sickness warnings in the ride queue so I can’t see riding this one multiple times in a row. Perhaps that’s why we only had to wait for 25 minutes to ride it?

I was ridiculously excited about riding JAWS because a) I’ve never ridden this version before, I’ve only been on the “studio tour” in Hollywood Universal and seen the shark there and b) this is the last JAWS ride in the world. How to describe it…hmmm. Imagine if Disney’s Jungle Cruise ride took itself seriously and add a big shark. Plus add some universal style special effects (at Universal something has either got to catch fire or get you wet.) Despite its ridiculousness I loved it.

From there we walked around the park until we got to a land based on The Minions from Despicable Me. There we rode a Minions ride. Imagine if the vehicle from Star Tours was a convertible. The story tried to have the silliness of The Minions movies while also having the heart. It did pretty well, though my back was a bit sore afterwards. The ride vehicle really jerks around!

Our final ride was Spider-Man. Another ride with practical and projected scenes, this one takes you through on a ride vehicle similar to The Indiana Jones ride, and you have 3-D glasses to boot. The ride vehicle movement was pretty impressive, though the jerkiness didn’t help my back. The very dated projections really showed the age of the ride.

It was near closing time and we’d made it all around the park. There’s still a few places we haven’t yet visited but we got a good lay of the land look. Tomorrow we a will do a timed entry into Super Mario World, the land of Nintendo. Super excited about this!

We split a burger and fries from Shake Shack, conveniently located in our hotel. We were in bed by 8pm, asleep by 8:30pm.

Thanks for following along!