The bad thing about traveling internationally is losing a day before or after the trip. Our flight departed yesterday at 10:10am and we arrived at 2:05pm today, Tuesday. Also, Narita airport is pretty far from Tokyo city center, so today is pretty much going to be another travel day for us. You got to hand it to the Japanese though…they got efficiency down. After we deplaned, we were all herded to complete all 3 different sections: quarantine, immigration, and customs declaration. I filled out the Visit Japan Web form a few days ago and received a form for quarantine and QR codes for the other 2. For quarantine, they just wanted us to show the blue form on our phones, customs was the longest and that still only took about 20 mins (we showed our QR codes and then they took our pictures and fingerprinted us), and customs, they scanned our passports and QR codes and we just clicked okay on the screen.

We had first planned on eating at the airport lounge at Narita, but found out that they are only for departures. We were only able to go to one lounge, the IASS Executive Lounge, and that one only served drinks. It was still a nice reprieve to fill up our water bottle, and drink some orange juice and coffee while Anson finished installing my data SIM card (didn’t know my phone could be sooo fast), but we probably stayed there for less than 10 mins. We went to our first convenience store, Lawson, and got some onigiris, a teriyaki chicken bowl, yakitori stick, and a salad for dinner.

I didn’t know how much time it would take to get thru customs and how long we would be at the lounge, but since it was pretty quick, we decided to take the Disney limousine bus to our hotel as it was the most convenient form of transportation directly to our hotel’s doorsteps. It cost 1900 yen (~$15) each and the last bus was at 4:10pm. If we had taken the Narita express train to Tokyo station and then transfer to the Keiyo line, it would have cost $24/pp.

I used 99k in points for our 3 night stay at Hilton Tokyo Bay near Disney. We’re going to Disneysea the day after tomorrow, but I thought it would be best to have a home base in one place rather than switching hotels in between and we’ll just use public transportation to go into the city tomorrow. Since I have gold status, we were upgraded to a preferred oceanview room overlooking the serene Tokyo bay and get complimentary breakfast (more on that tomorrow…it’s good lol).

We were going to walk 40 mins to downtown Disney and sightsee and get groceries, but decided to take it easy this first night so that we wouldn’t get sick. We explored the hotel (they have a Lawson on the first floor!), had a romantic stroll right near the waterfront, and listened/partially watched the Disneysea night performance from the outside (excited for Thursday!).

Side notes: 1. top notch efficiency in loading us on to the airport bus 2. In the bathroom, heated toilet seat/bidet and section of mirror over the sink that does not become foggy even after showering.

Cost: Lawson 1800 + bus to Disney 3800 = 5600 yen (~$43)