disneyland tokyo

disneyland tokyo... i didn't know it existed until we stayed at the tokyo bay hilton right across the street. (by far the nicest hotel we stayed in on our entire trip.)

when we arrived in narita tokyo (from bangkok) we discovered that our connecting flight to san francisco was delayed a day. we went to the united service desk and they set us up in the tokyo bay hilton for the night.

after spending a while trying to find the bus to the hotel and getting to know some of the other travellers who were stranded with us, we passed disneyland tokyo on our way to our hotel. the hotel itself was pretty fancy for one that seems to cater to families who are taking their kids to disneyland.

our bathroom was pretty over the top. normally in the shower you have one or two dials that control the temperature and preasure of the water and then another switch (or dial) that controls if the water goes to a shower head or the bath faucet. in the bathroom here there were four dials. one to control the temperature, and then one each to control the flow for the bath faucet, the main showerhead, and the secondary showerhead (which was on a hose so you could spray water where ever you want.)
hell, you could run all three at the same time. i think it was actually designed for this because the water preassure here was so high that it was painfull to have the shower on full blast. also, the toilet seat was a number.. it had a scent neutralizer and a bunch of options for shooting heated water up your ass. (a "bidet" and "spray" mode, each of which could be augmented with an "oscillation" option.) i don't like heated toilet seats because whenever you sit down it seems like someone else has just finished up an extended stay on the can right before you. also, i didn't like the fact that whenever you sat down the toilet seat started humming.

for food, united (the airline we were flying) provided with coupons for the hotel resturant. initially we were really upset about this because most the time hotel food sucks. but in this case it wasn't too bad. dinner consisted of a large buffet with a resonable selection of decent food. i pigged out on the sushi and it was pretty good. (MUCH better than i was expecting.) the one thing not covered by the coupons was drinks. boy were they expensive. a bottle of beer was going for about 10 bucks. (The buffet itself cost about $45 USD.) we decided to stkip on the beer with dinner and hit the bar after dinner for a martini.

well, the hotel bar decour (which was really just an extension of the resturant) was great and we ordered two bombay saphire martinis. the going rate for one of these babies was about $18 USD and unfortunatly it was THE SMALLEST martini i have ever seen. i know that the japanese can be small people but this was ridiculous. it was served in a tiny martini glass (probably about a 2.5 oz glass) and it was only 2/3 full, if that. a real disapointment. my normal two martini limit could have easily been raised here to a four of five martini limit... but of course that would have done some serious damage to my wallet.