Otakon 2016

I was planning to make this post in the week after Otakon, and then I decided against it to post more book reviews, and then I ran out of motivation to write the rest of them and put this back on the schedule. So here we are!

This was my 4th Otakon; I started going after my freshman year of high school. This year was special because it was the last year at the Baltimore Convention Center before moving to DC, and the first day of the con coincided with my 19th birthday! This was also my first time staying in a hotel for a convention after spending my first 12ish cons commuting from home.

This was what my suitcase looked like when I threw it together on Friday morning. I only touched like 10% of the snacks I brought ... I wasn't sure what to expect for the weekend, so I over-prepared a little bit. That sweatshirt I packed actually came in handy, though.

My parents took me to IHOP for my birthday breakfast before we left for the convention. My picture of my crepe turned out blurry ;o; I'm really glad it worked out to have breakfast with both of my parents on my birthday ♥ I'm also grateful that they were willing to endure the Baltimore convention traffic one last time to drop me off (づ￣ ³￣)づ ♥

We switched our hotel reservations twice before the convention, ultimately ending up at the Hilton! We had minor issues checking in because we wanted connecting rooms and had to change one of them from two queens to a single king to make it work. I claimed the cot in the left picture (•̀⌄•́) 

Staying at the hotel with a bunch of my friends was such a great experience and I'm so glad I decided to do it! It made the convention so much easier, since I could drop off the stuff I bought and could hide in the room for some quiet time when I got tired during the day. It was also a 10 person sleepover for two nights and I got to spend a lot of time with my friends that I wouldn't have been able to otherwise. 

My friends took me out to Panera for my birthday dinner! I converted two of them to the miracle that is a mac and cheese bread bowl lol (ʃƪ¬‿¬) The Panera had a loft and we managed to commandeer it all to ourselves. (Not that they were that busy, anyway.) I think the dinner was one of my favorite memories of the weekend.

Our hotel had a pool, and our friend who was gofering wanted to use it but forgot a swimsuit, so another guy and I made a run to the Harborplace to get him one. The pool was always closed by the time our gofer friend was done working though  ヽ(#`Д´)ﾉ We also can't figure out if the swimsuit ever made it home with anyone from the rooms ... 

On Saturday I cosplayed Pidge from the new Voltron series! I'd made the shirt in one 12-hour session about a week before the convention and I'm still surprised by how nicely it turned out! I made it out of a pattern for a guy's baseball tee and the few mistakes I made were fairly easy to recover from. 

However, I made the mistake of forgetting to pack my foundation in my luggage ;;;  (」ﾟヘﾟ)」 I was lucky enough that our gofer friend was willing to walk the half mile to the CVS with me so I could buy another bottle. (So now I have two bottles of foundation that I rarely ever wear ...)

Pidge was entirely the reason I'd decided to sign up for a Netflix trial and watch Voltron. I'd picked up enough from my tumblr dash that made me feel like I'd like Pidge, and I was blown away by how much I loved them by the end of the current season. It felt like such a perfect cosplay for me. I'm considering making a hoodie version of the shirt for AUSA or Katsucon.

My friend bought an expensive sword replica and we all took a stab at posing with it. (Ha. I'm funny.) 

(That sword is heavy. One of the guys was just out of frame to the left, holding the end of the sword up for me. Only a couple people were in the room at the time and we didn't tell that to the other guys when we showed them the picture. \(۶•̀ᴗ•́)۶/ )

My lunch and dinner on Saturday were both Subway. Two of the guys went on a lunch run for all of us, and I ended up eating it again for dinner because the line for Chipotle was so long. I actually ditched my friends in the Chipotle line, got my food, regrouped with them, and had my 6-inch sub and cookies eaten by the time they paid for their food. (¬‿¬) (I may have also eaten my food really fast to prove my point ...)

I had a really great experience cosplaying Pidge on Saturday, so I decided to wear the outfit again on Sunday. (This picture's from Saturday, though.) We had some minor chaos on Sunday regarding the rides home, but we managed to work everything out. 

I was the second person to leave the rooms so I didn't really get to say goodbye to the friends I didn't see much before the convention. One of the guys actually came to visit from Wisconsin and I didn't get to talk to him again before he left ... 

My friends had an interesting conversation on the art of weaponry on the ride home ... which ultimately turned into:

(The picture of my friends was staged, don't worry.) 

I managed to convince the other three to stop at Roy Rogers for dinner on the way home. Another friend and I had done that last year and I'm glad I got to do it one more time. We spent close to an hour there and it was a great way to wrap up the weekend. 

TL;DR Otakon was more fun than I was anticipating, and I'm incredibly grateful for being able to spend my birthday weekend with my friends doing something I love ♥

Otakon will be during my birthday weekend again next year, and we've already booked two hotel rooms for its new location in DC! (Their hotel block opened up so early, good lord.) I'm sad to leave Baltimore behind but I'm looking forward to the new experience -- and being able to take the metro down, lol. My next planned conventions are Anime USA in October and Katsucon in February. Our group is discussing our plans for those conventions as well, so we'll see how that goes. I'm hoping to get a hotel for Katsucon as well ...