Okay, I said I'd do this yesterday but I didn't. I was chillin'. On with the show!

Friday 25th
I headed out from Stoke to London Euston packing as little as I could since I knew I'd be bringing a lot of stuff back with me. The journey to London was painless, as was the Underground. Problems turned up once I got to the Docklands Light Railway (DLR) system. Apparently there had been a fire on the line or something so no-one was allowed into the station. Had to take a bus to Poplar or something...... but I didn't know which stop to get off at and got lost for a while.
Eventually found the Poplar DLR and made it to my hotel. Ibis Accor, very swish

Saturday 26th
Got up, had breakfast, went outside on a whim to check out the convention area and see if Karen might be out there, and found out that she'd been waiting for me for quite some time. Whoops, sorry Karen... Anyways, we went inside to queue and I've never seen so many cosplayers in one place. It was pretty awesome, and I was worrying Karen and myself with the fact that I could name 80% of the characters there Even got a pretty funny pic of Aladdin pointing a gun and Master Chief

We looked around at all the stuff there and bought plenty, although I wish I brought more money with me. Something to know for next time
Like me, Karen's a pretty big Ghost in the Shell fan... well, much more so than me actually. Either way, we saw little models of the Tachikoma from the series and just had to get them!


Worth £60, bought for £20. Sweet. I also got a t-shirt with the Laughing Man logo on it. I wore that the next day.

Later in the day my friend Sean turned up (I told him about all the cool stuff going on just the day before) so the three of us carried on looking around enjoying the con and getting to know each other. It was fun
Come 4:00 Karen had to head home, so Sean and I were going to head to the Cineworld to watch Vic Mignogna introduce the english dub of the FMA movie. This is when this went awry. We had to take the DLR again and this time I didn't have a ticket (mine previously carried over from the Underground but had now expired). I put my card into the machine as I had no change, but it wouldn't go in properly. Didn't know I had to put it in after I selected a ticket. The machine woke up and ate my card T_T
That put a damper on the night, but oddly enough I got over it fairly quickly after we headed back to the hotel and phoned the bank. New card on Saturday. Anyways, we watched an awesome episode of Dr Who, got drinks, and Sean headed home. I sketched stuff for a while then turned in.

Sunday 27th
Not wanting to repeat the previous day's tardiness, I got up early and headed out to the Convention Centre (only 200 metres from the hotel, yo) Met with Karen again who was talking to a Naruto cosplayer who'd apparently come all the way from Scotland! Dedication
Queuing up was pretty funny actually, there was a Dalek wondering around... probably looking for people to exterminate. Karen got out her camera and the next thing we hear is "PHOTO OPPORTUNITY DETECTED!" "MAKE SURE YOU GET MY BEST SIDE!"


"CHEEEEEEEEEEESE!"
After we got inside I decide I was on a mission. I wanted to buy a sword and didn't do so the previous day. Granted, I only had £70 left on me...... £22 I owed Karen for the tickets and some I needed for food and getting home... Anyway, I wanted a sword! They had the one from Kill Bill and it looked so good, but at £100 I couldn't really afford it (even if I had money), but I got a Bokken for a tenner so I'm pretty chuffed with that

I love my bokken. Swung it around wherever there was room

Sean arrived again and we did some more exploring. I played some Guitar Hero 2 and lost both games, but I did well enough and it was for fun We all entered the Dofus prize draw to win some artbooks and stuff. I really wanted those books, the art is fantastic. Didn't win though but that's alright. Accidently lost Sean a sale on a Beauty and the Beast drawing cos I saw a Transformers Masterpiece model.
Karen went outside to take pictures of the Kingdome Hearts cosplayers while me and Sean went to a voice actor Q&A panel with Vic Mignogna (Edward Elric, FMA), Bobby Edner (Vaan, FF12), and Spike Spencer (Shinja Ikari, Evangelion). These guys were hilarious and we learned some new things about the voice acting business.
The rest of the time consisted of buying manga, posters and wall scrolls, getting a load of stuff given to us free, and eating ridiculous amounts of this stuff:

Pocky is love. Says so on the box

All in all we had a great time, I finally met Karen in real life who was awesome, we all showed our sketchbooks, we chilled the took photos, and we wanna come back and do it again in October