mytravelbugbite

After the heavy hitting exploration of Hiroshima yesterday, today was far more lighthearted as we spent the day in Universal Studios, Osaka. Unlike Florida it is just the one park. It’s layout is like the original Universal Studios but it includes some of the attractions found in Islands of Adventure also including the SpiderMan ride and the Wizarding World of Harry Potter.

The park was busy despite the rain. To get into the Harry Potter you can get a ticket for a set time, we assumed it was for the ride but it turned out it was just to get into the area, we still had to queue for 3 hours to get onto the ride.

Rather than do a run down of all the rides I thought I would go through the good and not so good parts of the park. So I’ll start with what wasn’t so good:

1. The queue times- we may have been unlucky with people extending their bank holidays but this was much busier than whenever I’ve been to the Florida parks.

2. I know this will sound stupid because we are in Japan but it was just really odd to have SpiderMan and Dumbledore speaking to you in Japanese. It meant I didn’t know what was going on in some of the attractions or at the Beetlejuice show.

3. The weather- pure bad luck.

What I liked about it was:

1. The Japanese are fanatical and up for such a laugh. They didn’t think twice about buying a big fluffy Elmo hat and wearing it around all day, no matter what age or gender (yes, we did see a Grandma Cookie Monster).

2. The rides and the decorations- plus it was all done up for Christmas.

3. The magical starlight parade- the music was annoying but the parade lived up to its name.

4. The Wizarding World of Harry Potter- enough said.

5. It is amazing!!!

Oh, and yes we did feel the need to fit in with the hat wearing crowds so SpiderMan and Snoopy were purchased.