ANIMETHON (Day 1)
To hell with work. None of you care what we did on Thursday. Though Doug did repair the carpentry shop bike, and I did ride it in circles around the shop for half an hour, hauling various other summer student co-workers in the toolbox on the back, but! That's not important. Not in comparison to why we left right after work for the city.
For the first time in my whole life of living in Alberta, I am attending Animethon, the Edmonton anime convention, and, allegedly, the longest running convention in this part of North America. Or so I'm told. All I know is that I've wanted to go since I was sixteen, and now that I'm twenty one, I'm finally doing it. I didn't get my hopes up too high though; this is still Alberta, and old or not, it's still run by a university group.
This morning, I found myself disappointed rather quickly. The website claimed that registration -- pre or otherwise -- began on Friday at 8am. Helaine and I arrived at ten to nine, and no one had moved. We found our way to the pre-registered line -- populated by maybe twenty other people -- and were excited for the fact that we'd be getting in soon. Not so much. When, at ten to ten, they finally started moving people through registration, the non-pre-registered line moved substantially faster than the pre-registered line. They had two people getting through those of us who went out of the way to pay early to get an upper hand, and six going through the people who'd just turned up that morning. Something about that doesn't seem fair.
Still, we got through relatively quickly, and once we had our programs, we moved to a sitting area to plan our attack. Lo-and-behold, there was next to nothing going on today. The Exhibition Hall isn't even open until 11 tomorrow. As well as Artist's Alley. We found two things to do -- a screening and an improv event -- and we wound up only going to one. However, we did make a friend.
Once we got over the fact that we had a fairly uneventful Friday ahead of us, we went to find something to drink. We lounged around the foodcourt for a while, and in the process, I was harrassed by an adorable Elliot. Who was accompanying another Gilbert and a Vincent. And that set us up for the rest of the day. After spending about an hour with these people, we broke off to wander and learn the area, only to run into Elliot again. She was on her way to a screening, and decided to spend the half hour she had hanging around with us. Which turned into all day.
We went as a threesome to a voice actor Q&A, we watched Durarara together -- what we got to see as there were massive technical difficulties -- and we went out for sushi after. We split up afterwards, though, needing to put our leftovers away. And, our being as tired as we were, once we hit the hotel room again, we just couldn't see a reason to go out again. I'll have to make it up to dear Elliot tomorrow.
But yes. That's day one. I've plenty of pictures and it's been quite the experience. We'll see what the -- supposedly -- better day two holds in store for us. I am beyond excited, though we'll have to get to bed a little earlier tonight I imagine. Haha.