Final Trip Item

I wrote most of this on the plane, and added links after the fact...

Anime Expo is over. Alan, Dan, Tom, John and I are in the airplane heading for home. As I mentioned in the last post, the Masquerade ran past midnight on Saturday. While there were one or two imaginative sketches, most were pretty boring. The nice part is that there were a lot of detailed, beautiful costumes. There was one rather impressive 'giant' robot, probably seven or eight feet tall, though it was hard to judge exactly seated among the audience.

Sunday morning was take-it-easy time. We went to Coco's for breakfast, and I got oatmeal and fruit. Very healthy! We kicked around the dealers' room, and I bought two more DVDs: 36th Chamber of Shaolin (another Shaw Brothers old school kung fu movie) and Hero (Zhang Yimou's new movie starring Jet Li, Zhang Ziyi, Maggie Cheung and Donnie Yen). Alan was so impressed by the cast that he picked up a copy as well. I managed to resist a ton of other titles that I was interested in, such as Uzumaki, Volcano High School, Versus and Returner.

The final activities of the convention were the charity auction, awards and closing ceremony. We planned to ditch after the auction, and go out for eats.

The proceeds of the auction, as usual, went to City of Hope. I don't know how much total was raised, as they usually announce that at the closing ceremony, which we skipped. Even simple sketches were going for $100. One that I would have bid for in a realistic world, a sketch by Akemi Takada (character designer for Kimagure Orange Road) of the Patlabor character Noa, went for $5000. I think the highest bid item went for $7000. This is why I attend the auction, to see how irrational folks wiil get, bidding hundreds of dollars for items that are not even signed, just posters.

Alan bid for and won a collection of Street Fighter art cards. Around $120, I think. I heard that Theo, whom I met two years ago at Anime Expo 2001, bid on and won the Silent Moebius scroll. Don't remember how much, but it was over a hundred, easily.

Once the auction was over, when they began the award ceremonies, we bailed to the room to dump all our stuff. Hanging out, chatting, deciding where we were going to eat, we settled on Catal (or it's outside bar, the Uva Bar) in Downtown Disney. It really is quite convenient, and I wish I'd figured it out years ago (hwo many years has Downtown Disney been there?). I've been going to Expo for years, sometimes consecutive, sometimes every other year, and most of those years have been across the street from Disney. I never went since I didn't want to buy a pass and skip part of the convention. But last year Jean, Kelly and I went to Disneyland for Kelly's seventh birthday, and we found out about Downtown Disney, a line of shops and restaurants open to the general public without passes.

So i agitated this year for a 'field trip' to Downtown Disney for food, and we ended up going several times. This final time, we walked around and enjoyed the music, a couple of the guys stopping in Wetzel's Pretzels for a snack before dinner. Then Alan led us to the Lego store, where I bought a couple of trinkets for Kelly.

Dinner at Catal was really nice. I had roast duck with cornbread, which came on a plate looking like nouvelle cuisine, but nevertheless filled me just fine. After dinner we went to the Confectionary so that Alan could buy a bon bon, then across the street to Haagen-Dazs. I bought a mango sorbet for my dessert. Yummy!

Finally, we tracked our way back to the hotel, winding down around midnight. This morning we got up around 5am so we could get our shuttle bus to the airport. Now I'm sitting on the plane, and this pretty much ends my vacation!