July 1, 2007
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Another thing I do annually is go to the Anime Expo, and this time it was held at the Long Beach Convention Center in Southern California. This is the first time I’ve ever been to the LBCC, especially for Anime Expo. While I was familiar with how things are done when they hold the event at the Anaheim Convention Center, this time around I had to relearn how to get around once again. The first problem was that I was thinking that parking might be a problem, but thankfully it wasn’t. Parking was full at the convention center, but the parking structure a block away wasn’t yet, so no problem so far.
Walking up the steps to the front of the convention center, the first thing I noticed was that once again there’s a lot of cosplayers (costumed folks) in attendance. At first I would say that it was something like one out of twenty people cosplaying, but minutes later it felt more like one out of five! Naruto and Final Fantasy cosplayers seemed to be the most represented, but ofcourse the school girls and the goth chicks were also in full force. At one point, a TV crew was there interviewing somebody in a Gundam outfit, and the interviewer was none other than James Kyson Lee who is currently most known as playing Ando from the hit TV show “Heroes.”
As me and my fiancee has been doing every year so far, we’ve only been going for the “exhibit hall only” pass, since we don’t really attend any of the shows or anime screenings. So where do we register? I don’t know. We walked around for a half an hour, going from one place to another, up stairs, down stairs, pretty much going in circles. We asked for directions and while they all pointed in one general direction, we didn’t know exactly where it was. It was to the point that my fiancee was suggesting that if they aren’t doing it in Anaheim next year, she’s not going to bother going. I reassured her that we just need to figure it out this year, and the following years won’t be an issue. We eventually did get to the registration room, and to our surprise they forego the hand stamps for the exhibit hall only access and are now giving us a full attendee badge, plus program guide with registration. My fiancee joked that they are probably charging us more this year because of these “extras” and sure enough five dollars more than what I remembered it to be last year. Ah well, they probably realized that a good majority of attendees are opting for the exhibit hall only pass and this year they plan to capitalize on it.
Once entering the exhibit hall; aka the dealer’s room, the first thing we noticed was how the layout was a tad skewed to the way the whole hall was shaped. All the booths were in relatively straight rows, but the room was shaped like a “V” so you can just imagine how it looks. We stayed at the exhibit hall for a little over two hours, bought a few things (less than other years), took photos of cosplayers, and just overall had a good time. I’d like to point out though, that there are more booths carrying more hentai (porn) products than I’ve ever seen in the past years.
This was the second day of a four day show, so there weren’t as many interesting cosplayers to take a picture of like I normally expect. I’m guessing they are all waiting until Sunday for the huge masquerade show. It’s too bad, especially since we only dedicate one day a year to this event. So not as memorable an AnimeExpo like some years, but we’re definitely still coming back for more next year.
Comments (2)
my friend went to one recently and told me there were a lot of death note cosplayers so i looked through your shots for that lol =P
you know, I must have the death note cosplayers confused as just goth peeps.