While Otakon does not have all the awesome toy news that we saw at SDCC, it is filled with some pretty fun events and of course exciting adventures. So we decided to give those of you who could not attend a little taste of the con with play-by-play daily journals! So hit the jump and see what Stephen and I got up to the first day of the convention!

We got up a bit late today, mainly because the Dealer's Room opened at noon and I mainly came here to buy stuff..... I mean work. So we get there at 12:20 and this is the line. Turns out they haven't even opened the room yet, and the line for the room was already full. This actually makes SDCC look like a smoothly run event! So they told us to come back in a few hours, and there were no interesting panels at that time so we decided to go get some chow.

 

Most restaurants in the area are packed to the brim, but thankfully a little place called Noodles & Company still had tables open. It was an odd restaurant because they had literally everything that you can make with noodles, from Asian stir-fry to traditional mac & cheese. I went with the Bangkok curry noodles, which was kind of a Thai-Indian curry fusion. It surprisingly had most of the flavors you expect from Thai curry, including tamarind, although it was light on the chilies and didn't have any fish sauce. Well it only cost $15 to feed 3 people, so I wasn't really expecting a gourmet meal! It was decent, fast, and cheap, just what you want during a convention.

 

On the way back we spotted this lovely lady. I just have one question: if you are confident enough to walk around in full body paint, why would you wear granny panties? Granted, it made for some awesome granny panty jokes, but please think before you put together a cosplay. 

 

The Dealer's Room is huge, but pickings were surprisingly slim. Tomorrow we will really comb through the isles, but today a cursory look-over lead to no real awesome finds aside from a few reasonably priced prize figures. So we headed to Artist Alley, one of my favorite places at Otakon. There are always awesome prints and crazy plushes on display, and I couldn't resist picking some stuff up. We did not have time to snap any pictures of what we got, but look for them in our upcoming loot post!

 

This all took about 6 hours and my feet were still worn out from SDCC, so we took a little break and sat outside the Dealer's Room. There is some good cosplay at Otakon, but also a lot of bad cosplay. Sitting down and watching the bad stuff walk by is pretty much the #1 awesome activity to do here. Seriously, try it some time.

Then we went back the hotel to drop off our rather measly loot and watched some tv on one of the two flatscreens in our room. Why two, you ask? I have no clue, but our hotel room is kind of the greatest thing ever. We were exhausted today, but tomorrow we promise to take pictures of everything!

 

It was time for dinner, and Stephen and I actually got to eat dinner alone! For the past 2 weeks we have shared literally every meal with other people, from breakfast to midnight snacks. So we decided to be a little fancy and go to a nice tapas restaurant, and holy moly was the food amazing. Mussels, empanadas, duck, and a few tasty drinks were exactly what we needed to recharge. And then.... dessert. DEAR GOD these were amazing. One is an espresso mousse with a ganache topping, the other is a banana-caramel-cheese fried thing. 

 

 

Otakon runs late, so we decided to hit up the Friday Night Fan Parodies which run form 11 to 1:30. We mostly went because we thought they were showing Eva reDeath (aka the greatest thing ever) tonight, though it turns out it is going to be shown on Saturday. I guess we'll be going back tomorrow! On Friday there was a lot of mediocre parodies, some truly atrocious ones, and then some abridged Dragonball Z which made it totally worth going.

Well, that wraps up our Day 1 Journal! All in all it was a fun but tiring day full of awesome prints, delicious food and terrible cosplay. And honestly, that's all I want out of a convention! Part 2 of our awesome Otakon journal will be up tomorrow night, so be sure to stop by and check it out!