Day 80 - March 27

I've been taking way too long to get these updates written, so I hope I haven't forgotten anything >_<

Saturday was the Tokyo International Anime Fair, which Li and I had heard about a couple weeks prior and decided to attend.  What made things even better was that it was being held in the Tokyo Big Sight, which is in Odaiba, and this was the weekend we had planned to reschedule our Odaiba onsen trip with Allison for.  Unfortunately, Allison just got a new job as a waitress in a bar in Takadanobaba and had to work, so once again we had to call off our plans for the onsen.

This was my first time actually getting up close and personal with the Tokyo Big Sight, and I have to say, that is an awesome building.  Well, the main building is, the rest of it is just a series of very large halls in normal-looking buildings.  Sadly, the Fair was being held in one of those very large halls that was not part of the main building, but oh well I still got to walk through the place.  It only cost us 1,000Y to get in for the day, but that is mostly since this isn't an anime convention, its more of an industry trade show.  Practically no one cosplays for this aside from the 'booth babes' and the handful of gaijin wearing some horrid excuse for cosplay.  People like that make me feel embarrassed for being a foreigner.

Overall the fair was pretty sweet.  There was less stuff for sale there than I was expecting, but I did find a few things worth buying: an event-only Senjogahara fan, a Garden of Sinners day planner, and several little pencil board things of Fushigi Yuugi (these are gifts for Lisa).  I was especially amazed about the last part, since that show came out a long time ago and they had a ton of different designs of these pencil board-ish things.  Also, the main highlight of the fair for me:  the debut of the new Rin figure from UBW!!!  It was unpainted (being a prototype and all), but holy crap I will pay WHATEVER THEY ASK when that comes out.  It is one of the highest quality figures I have ever seen in my life, and I will buy the sh-t out of that thing when it comes up for preorder.  They also had the previously unannounced new Saber Alter figure debuting here, which was unpainted as well and looked absolutely amazing, but I am less interested in that than the new Saber figure (much less the Rin) coming out later this year.

Aside from that I can't really remember any specifically memorable things I saw at the fair, just lots of new stuff coming out soon.  Also, they had a huge display for these new Black Rock Shooter figures, which looked awesome enough for me to become interested in looking into the show.

Once we had finished with the fair content we grabbed some food from the several food stands in the corner of the hall.  Li got some French hot dog thing while I got two corn dogs, or as they're called here "American Dogs."  There was this little open area behind the food stands where a lot of people were sitting to eat in their little groups since the tables in front of the stands were very full, but also possibly because it was out of the way and much quieter.  We sat down in a little open spot somewhat close to one of the tall temporary walls they had set up to eat our food.  While we were eating Li (who was facing the wall) started to exclaim something but was silenced by the EXTREMELY loud crash caused by a section of the temporary wall falling over and towards where everyone was sitting.  The top of the wall came at most an inch away from slamming right into this sitting guy's spine.  I myself was no more than 2 feet from the thing.  Everyone in the immediate area just froze and looked around as if to say, "holy shit, that could have been really bad."  Fortunately, the guy who had been sitting directly under it had gotten up and left a few minutes before, otherwise, that would have really bad.  With this, we quickly finished eating and then got the heck out of there lol. 

On our way back to the station we stopped by the arcade that has Gundam Kizuna for only 400Y per play.  As usual we played 5 games in order to reap the maximum benefit of the discount (ie 5 for the price of 4), and then finally left for 'baba around 7pm.  Since the all you can eat stakehouse doesn't exist in Odaiba anymore, we altered our plans and instead tried out Shakey's, a pizza place in 'baba that is directly under the 270Y bar.  The pizza was quite good, and so far the only place in this entire country I've seen that has regular pepperoni pizza.  I don't know what it is with these people and their apparent discrimination against pepperoni pizza, but I find it very upsetting.  Shakey's isn't too expensive either; a little less than 2,000Y for a full pizza (about the size of a large in the US).  I definitely think we'll be going back.