Otakon!

Recently, I went to Otakon 2006. Actually, it wasn't that recently anymore... it was a couple of weeks ago already! But I took so many pictures, I have been taking forever to sort through them all in my (sadly limited) spare time... However! I'm finally ready to start posting 'em all here. I'll have to do it in a couple of blocks tho, so that I can fit them. Although the purpose of my trip was to go to the convention, conventions make for very boring photos of Pinkys, so mostly I'll be posting pix of my gang running rampant thru Baltimore!

If Anime Boston is Suu's birthday, then Otakon is the birthday for Alice (Arisu) and Hikaru. (Everyone else came via mail order) So they had to come along this year, of course. And where they go, Suu and Akito go. And I also had to take along the Arc twins for good measure. So we were a large party!

The first day of the trip was largely filled up with driving down to Baltimore, and the Pinky gang didn't get out for any photo ops. Once we arrived, we ran along to the convention center to register and then to find some food... that didn't result in any photo ops either. So it wasn't until the next morning that the gang got their camera time.

We stayed in two different hotels on our trip. The first night we were just outside of Baltimore. That hotel wasn't the nicest, but it had one really awesome feature - breakfast was free, and it was a make your own waffle bar! As soon as Arc heard that, she was there to check it out (everyone else was apparently too lazy and slept in... ^.^; Arc is very motivated when food is involved tho!)

Assessing the situation:


Close-up of the waffle apparatus:


Ta da! Breakfast!


After our hearty waffle meal, we headed off the convention. Fortunately we had already registered last night when the line was manageable. The first day convention line is a scary, scary thing. Last year I was in the line. And it was raining. For hours. It wasn't pretty... So this year I made sure to get that out of the way early!

Here's Arc gloating over the line she isn't in:



The convention center is full of model boats, inspiring grand thoughts of a Pinky Pirate photo shoot... But I was too chicken to try to climb over people and velvet ropes to set up the shot...


The first morning I went to a panel on toy collecting. I'm not sure I learned anything new - except for the fact that my little Pinky collection is nothing! - but it was fun anyway.


After the panel, I decided to meet up with my friends and go look for some lunch/tour Baltimore. I really wanted to hit the dealer's room immediately, but there was a huge line and I didn't see the point of waiting in it. This was a bit of a miscalculation, apparently, as a lot of good deals and rare finds disappeared within the first hour or two of dealer's room action. Despite the registration line, i's easy to forget how many people are really there, but let's face it, 22,000 people is a LOT of people! So I missed my chance at $12 Street Fighters at the HLJ table. I actually didn't end up buying any new Pinkys at all. But that's ok, there weren't very many that I'm looking for (except for cheaply priced doubles) and I did buy some other cool stuff. The Pinky gang decided this was ok, as they are concerned about quarters getting crowded back at home anyway...

Tomorrow I'll post some photos from the Fells' Point which is where we ended up looking for our lunch. Our second hotel was very close to that neighborhood, which turned out to be kind of nice (even tho it was a bit of a hike to and from the convention center) because that was actually a fairly nice area to hang out in.