RAIN RAIN RAIN!!!!

Woke up, had more of that fantastic breakfast (managed to find a slice of cheese so it wasn’t just buttered toast, lol), then left. It was absolutely tipping it down, thunder, lightning, everything. Dash to the bus stop with many many other people huddled in there like penguins, all very damp.

Got to the expo, after being herded through lines outside and inside, then outside again (all the while still raining) we eventually got inside. Off to watch the Morning Musume signing session and meet up with @CDevil @Catchfivebats, @Carlos et all. Now they had been queuing since the day before in the hopes of getting into this “first come first served” signing session, but unfortunately for them this signing session was limited to French people only, and no i’m not joking either. There are “premium tickets” that foreign people aren’t allowed to buy that let you into the convention early, and so everyone with these premium French person only tickets got into the convention and filled up the signing session way before any of the people that lined up overnight even got let in. It takes the piss really when you’ve got people spending money flying all the way from America or even Mexico, lining up overnight, and they still don’t get an autograph because the organizers have something against foreigners (guess they’d get on well with Dawa then ), kinda ironic really, considering they’re running a convention that celebrates a foreign culture.

Anyway, we watched the signing thing, waved, took some pictures as they left.

After that we wandered off around the convention, went to the Kirarin Revolution cosplay and karaoke thing only to find it had been delayed by an hour or so, so walked around some more. Found the Hello Project booth, got to look at the costumes on display up close (the guy behind the desk said they were both Junjun’s and showed us her nametag on the back of the neck!):

(gotta say the green dress was looking a bit frayed on the edges, lol, and according to @RadioHexi they weren’t very well made)

After that, walked off, found the Kyoto Animation stand (incidentally I don’t remember a KyoAni stand at AX last year… do they only go to France?) and took pictures of the Haruhi movie cels and pencil drawings they had on display. And god knows (lol Haruhi) how I missed that before, the aforementioned mecca of Kirarin Revolution, like an entire massive stand of goods, manga, dvd’s, and various other merchandise, lol.

After some wandering around, some getting lost, and some more wandering around, we eventually made it back to the place where the Kirarin Revolution thing was going on. It basically consisted of a couple of 5 year olds dressed up in KiraRevo cosplay, and a bunch of 18+ year olds also dressed up in cosplay being given points by the manga author, lol. A couple of them sung stuff without any backing music (so not quite karaoke), but what really surprised me is that of those that sung it seemed the young 5 year olds were singing the Japanese versions of the songs, whereas the older people were all singing the French versions. Shouldn’t it have been the other way around?! The event did drag on a bit, but it was nice to see more KiraRevo love nontheless, and the guy that came on at the end and done a perfect rendition of Balalaika complete with dance moves (without backing song, or lyrics in front of him I might add!) was a genius!

(it’s such a classic song, I didn’t feel a mere link to it was enough )

Can’t remember what we done after that so i’ll just assume we went back to the hotel, lol. This time we *did* manage to order pizza (with the help of the hotel receptionist using my mobile phone… because they were too stingy to let us use the hotel phone). Grabbed a few bottles of beer from the hotel next door and everyone (namely: me, @MorningtimeBlog, @RadioHexi, @Paul Elliot, @ptom98, @Jltos) returned back to @ptom98′s room to eat and watch the nine smile concert (aka Koharu’s graduation concert). Much discussion was had in-between people falling asleep, everything from bingo wings to a certain monkey and frog.

And eventually the night came to a close, final day tomorrow!