Disneyland

After putting it off for years we decided to visit Tokyo Disneyland....guess it was one of those things to be notched up as an experience.


The whole place functioned like clockwork, amazingly well organised. And with a fanatical army of street sweepers sporting squeaky clean colgate smiles ready to swoop on any discarded scraps it was as clean as all hell too.

The most fun part from my point of view was Splash Mountain. For those of you who don't know it you gently float along in a fake log raft kind of thing along the top of a mountain with soothing music in the background and cuddly characters popping here and there to say hello. Then when you are suitably relaxed and lulled into a sense of security there's a series of what feel like vertical drops down waterfalls....it goes damn fast...which is probably the whole point of it.

Anyway what happened was Lani was tall enough by about a centimetre to go on the ride. So she unwittingly skipped along the path , hopped into the raft with a great huge grin on 'er dial. Literally seconds later however, after the first drop, she was packing the darkies big time...."da da daddy...la la lani no like this one ....lani go home now". You can't just hop of a roller coaster in mid flight though. You get the picture. She enjoyed the other rides but was bit more knowing.





King Mickey
One thing that has taken a long time getting used to here was grown adults going off their trolley over kids characters. There's unwritten quest for everything cute and cuddly here.

I think even Lani was somewhat disconcerted to see grown women arms flailing above their heads, running across the tarmac, all to touch King Mickey.

Led Zeppelin

went to a Led Zeppelin copy band concert up in Shibuya ...one of the centres of Tokyo the other night. The Japanese are famed for having an amazing ability to copy things down to the most minute of details. So it was something close to deja vu when this band decided to copy a concert of Zeppelin's, originally filmed in the 70's in Madison Square Garden. The hair, the lighting, the costumes, the band members moves were all copied impeccably. What was completely and utterly dumbfounding though was when they proceeded to copy the improvisation from the original concert.

It was daaaamn good though...something I think may be only the Japanese could pull off with their absolute and almost bordering on anal attention to detail.

First post

Non an altogether inspirational title for the first entry but for the technologically challenged with greater things pressing down on me it'll have to do.

I've decided to start this for those of you who are interested in my extremely exciting life and for the rest of you who just want to keep in touch. It's been about six years since I left lots of friends and family behind in Australia and so I thought I should get off my sweet peach behind and make an effort to keep in touch. So here we are...