#an11

Overall the convention was pretty fun. I was surprise that a lot of fun events/panels were on Friday. Saturday was great too but the downside is that alot of panels and events I wanted to go to were pretty much all at the same time. If I wanted too see them all I would miss half of them, miss them completely or had to stay for a short amount of time in order to get to the next one.

But mostly the panels and events I wanted to go to were later on the day. Basically at night and it sometimes was hard to get to them since I was soooo tired (the hotel is a long walk and one can't just walk to it quickly, take a nap and then walk back in time for what I want to see).

Here's what I and my friends went to..that I remember...

Friday:

What I've been looking forward to this year was AnimeNext, which is central New Jersey's biggest convention and it has been running for ten straight years with no sign of it slowing down. My friends and I had plan to go and this year we decided to try something new, getting a hotel room. It was difficult in deciding which hotel would benefit us, since we wanted one that was close to the convention (none of us own cars so it had to be a decent walking distance), spacy to fit us comfortably and cheap.

We finally decided on Staybridge Suites, it was a good price, they have complimentary breakfast buffet, we got the 2-bedroom/2 bath suite (with a sofabed) with a fully-equipped kitchen. It was exactly what we needed because we wanted to be comfortable, save money, and be able to cook our own meals since convention food and hotel food is overprice. We booked the room in advance so we didn't need to worry about it being taken by someone else and we wanted the special advance price because we save money in doing so.

Anyway, the first day of the convention didn't start that great. Friday at 7:45 is when we all met up at Newark Penn Station to board the train to New Brunswick. But some of us were running a bit late so we had to take a later train to get there. Of course, we didn't expect the train to be running late as well. It was delay for 15 mins, then 20 mins, then 25 mins and then another 25 mins. We were hoping to get to the convention early but the delays just made it take longer to get there which we couldn't do anything about it. So when the train finally came we decided to go to the convention first to get our per-registration badges before going to the hotel to check in and drop off our bags.

Now this is the part where it started to became a nightmare. Things just seem to go wrong one after the other and it all lead to the hotel. We got there to check in, only to be told that we can't get our room because THEY didn't take the money out of the credit card for the room. Every time my friend called them to make sure they will take the money out (she was finding it strange that when it was getting closer to the convention they didn't take out the money after all that time) they told her that they haven't yet and will get to it. Basically only till we got there did they tell us that they didn't take out the money for the room because there's a problem with the system that takes the money out.

They were blaming it on my friend, then they tried to blame it as the card's fault but in reality it's them. Their system that retrieves the money was at fault and they should have informed my friend of the problem as soon as possible. They basically gave us a hard time about it, not helping us find a solution for our troubles. Hell, they wanted to make us pay more for a new room and after two hours of trying to fix it, we finally got our original room.

It wasn't easy, we tried to fix the situation ourselves but when we realize that we weren't going anywhere we called for backup. Another friend called his mother and he explain the situation and she tried to help by taking a turn talking to the manager. We finally got somewhere but it wasn't by much. In the end a friend saved us by resorting to getting a random stranger to help us. The price of doing that was that he gets a $100 if he helped us.

After all that we finally got our room and we hoped that after all that trouble the room would be amazing and worth it. The room was great, better then I expected but after that we decided not to come to this hotel because the service sucks like hell. Also, on the same day...we were locked out of our room and if it wasn't for one of my friends heading back early for a nap (and waking up). We would have been stuck outside nearly all night since we came back to the hotel at night. So apparently they only gave us one key that worked, the key that our friend had to get in.

They started another new game called Fruit Basket. It's a popular Japanese game in elementary school. In the game a leader gives a group of players the name of a fruit. Once every player has a fruit, the leader stands in the middle of a circle of chairs (one chair less than the number of players) while all of the other players sit. Then the leader calls the name of a fruit, every player who has that fruit name has to stand up and try and find another seat along with the leader.

It's tomorrow!!! I've already packed my stuff today so that I don't waste time in getting ready in the morning. We really need to leave early in the morning to catch our train since we want to get there in a decent time then later. After all, there's some nice panels/events going on in the morning that some of my friends don't want to miss out on. So yeah I won't be on tumblr or online for the weekend since I'm going to be there, running around and stuff.

I'm pretty excited since this is the first time I and my friends are staying at an hotel for a convention. Plus, for one or two of them, it's their first time at a convention so we want everything to run smoothly for them and us.

I'm not cosplaying but maybe next time I will. That should give me plenty of time to figure out who I want to cosplay as and to get/create their costume in time for it. Other than that I will certainly bring my camera and capture everything so that you guys can see what it was like and stuff.