Animeland Wasabi 2015 Part 1

Hi guys!
   The weekend before last, I visited a local convention with a few friends and figured I would share my experience with you all! It's a bit of a novel, so I ended up splitting it into two posts. Animeland Wasabi is a convention that started 8 years ago at a hotel near the airport. It was notorious for having, well, problems. The first year, it was double booked with a cat convention at the same hotel, and another year, a wedding was happening at the same time, and all the attendees for the convention were forced to move aside so the bride could make her way down the hallway to her ceremony. Only a couple years ago, I waited in the pre-registration line for a good five hours because the hotel decided everyone needed to have a photo of themselves on their badge in order to walk around. Of course there have been other situations during the con as well, but for now, I'll stick to my experience for this year, and I promise it's not all bad!
   So at the end of last year, the convention got sued by Funimation for knowingly selling bootleg items in the Dealer's Room. No one even expected it to happen again this year, but a belated announcement proved us wrong. I've been attending this con since the very first one, even through all the disasters that have happened, so I decided to attend again. I enjoy having multiple conventions to visit, and having another excuse to visit friends that I only really see at them. ( I might add that I don't support selling bootleg items though.) I was also interested in seeing how they had recovered from the year before. I purchased weekend passes for my friend Ariel and I online, and we quickly put together some outfits to wear.

Lookin' pretty derp, but here's a coordinate shot.

   The weekend of the convention finally came, and we had made plans with Jamie and Kim for a girls' day on Friday, since that was the night of the formal ball, which was always my favorite part of Wasabi. We met up with Jamie at the hotel and got in line to pick up the tickets I had pre-ordered. They gave them to me without even asking for an ID, which I thought was a bit strange, but we were excited to check out the con, so I just sort of waved it off. We wandered around the hotel a bit, checking out what was going on, but the hotel was much smaller than previous years, so we ended up finding a quiet corner and playing a sort of animal alphabet game for what seemed like a couple hours. When we ran out of animal names, we finally got up and hit the Dealer's Room so I could find more Arpakasso for my collection. I managed to find a small mint one first, and a kitty keychain that was also made by Amuse. The next table we visited had these adorable tsum tsum shaped Arpakasso. They were from a new series, and the dealer had only brought one of each color to the con, so of course Jamie and I had to have them. I got the blue one, since it was a color I didn't have in my collection, and Jamie ended up getting the white one. I also got an Arpakasso pass case in an apple green color, so I'm relatively close to completing my rainbow of alpacas! Kim met up with us later in the afternoon, and when we headed back to the Dealer's Room for her to check the stuff out, she ended up buying the yellow tsum-pakasso (hehe) and we convinced Ariel to get the pink so we all had matching ones. After switching colors to match our outfits, we paraded around the con with alpacas in tote, which quite a few people found pretty adorable. It was a bunch of fun!
   Most of the rest of the day included browsing the Artist's Alley, taking selfies, belting out Disney songs, eating crepes, and gossiping until it was finally time for the formal to start. We met up with another friend who managed to sneak in without a badge, since they weren't checking for them anyway. I ended up teaching everyone to waltz during the formal, even though they played maybe ten songs on repeat, we still managed to have fun. We called it a night a little bit early and headed back to Ariel's and my apartment for a sleepover.
   Next time, I'll get around to posting about Saturday. It went downhill from there, so it'll but a little more ranty, but shorter in length. Thanks for reading!

-Rae ฅ^•ﻌ•^ฅ