Robot Claw

Seaworld was fun – more than we expected it would be. We capped the day with a visit to the ‘downtown disney’ shopping district (on Disney property). At the moment KLS is downstairs somewhere (our room is on the 4th floor) doing the laundry and I’m watching a period samurai drama on NHK television (untranslated), a JP station shown here in the resort. Tomorrow we will spend the day at Animal Kingdom. We’re looking forward to it – our 3 hour ‘preview’ after we got here last Saturday really made us want to spend a lot of time seeing all the park has to offer.

Disney’s got this racket going they call ‘pin trading’. Stores sell hundreds of different types of pins for people to collect and trade. In the parks you can approach employees and trade one of your pins for one they are wearing, and Disney ‘seeds’ rare pins this way. There are pins based on almost anything – pins for every ride, Disney film, character, TV Show, park, resort etc. Many pins are exclusive to certain shops or parks and they are ‘retired’ often and many seasonal pins exist as well. There are so many even if you wanted to collect a single character you’d have dozens. Trying to collect them all ($7 apiece) would probably be impossible. It’s obvious from the pin-filled lanyards on the necks of many guests this is very popular!

As you can see from the picture, my precisely calibrated and highly accurate Sam Toucan pedometer (free in a box of Fruit Loops) measured almost 15,000 steps today. That converts to – using 2.4 feet per step – just shy of 7.5 miles walked today. Not bad!