So here’s a day by day break down of what I did in San Diego for the first two days. The goal was for me to post these daily from my hotel room but internet is ten bucks a night, so yeah. Forget that. You’ll just have to live with bulk posts. More later!
WEDNESDAY
I woke up early today. Five am early. Plus the time change added an extra two hours to the day, so it was a long one. A long one that can best be described with one word; walking. We checked into the hotel after landing and decided to go get some food then head to the zoo. We walked to a foodery then to the closest bus stop before we realized that only a few of us had exact change, so the bus was, unfortunately, not an option. We decided to walk, thinking it wasn’t that far. Turns out it was pretty far. Or at least, it felt like it was pretty far. San Diego isn’t the most hilly city in the country or anything, but it’s not short on the inclines, especially compared to the completely flat Houston area landscape I’m used to. The Zoo was awesome and lots of fun, and also very huge. We saw a good part of it but after a while our feet and our legs were begging us to leave so we did. Wednesday is preview night, so after getting back to the hotel we head downstairs to the convention center to at least pick up our entrance badges. I knew the line would be long but wow. It wrapped all the way around the gigantic convention center, weaving back and forth on the convention center lawn, then down some street. Just walking to the end of the line had to be half a mile or so. The line, however, was briskly moving so we essentially walked to the end of the line then walked with the line to get our badges. The shocking momentum of the line was explained to me when I walked into the room where badges were being given out – there were a lot of people giving out badges. Rows and rows and rows of people on computers yelling for the next in line.
Anyways, preview night was open for just a few hours, so I walked the exhibitor hall, which is staggeringly huge. Every time I’m in there I’m lost. It’s by far the biggest single room I’ve ever stepped foot in. Each exhibitor pays a price for a space in the hall, some have smaller tables, some very large booths. It’s anyone from independent artists to Warner Brothers, DC Comics, and the Sci-Fi channel. Booths are flashy and big and often have people dressed up around them to attract viewers. There are thousands of these booths. The number is in the fifty-three hundreds, to get a little more specific. I met some artists and writers, some really nice, some obviously annoyed with the fact that they’re surrounded by nerds. I’ll go into the specifics of who I met a little later.
THURSDAY
First thing in the morning I traversed the exhibitor hall again, bought some comics and things, and met some more people and got them to write their names in a book and draw me little pictures. Again, I’ll go into more of that later. Before noon we went to Will Wright’s panel for Spore, which was absolutely fantastic. He’s a smart, funny, entertaining speaker and I don’t think there’s a person who was in that room (there were tons of people in that room) who isn’t going to buy that game now. I had watched panels online with him before and enjoyed them quite a bit, so I was thrilled that I was able to see one live. There was then some food eating and more exhibitor hall traversing. More people met, more pictures and names written in my book, &c, &c.
We went to dinner at some place in the Gas Lamp Quarter and it got me thinking. Going around San Diego, It’s crazy to see how much of an event this thing is for the whole city. There’s signs everywhere, people are talking about it on the radio, locals are bitching in the grocery store about how they always hate Comic-Con time because down town gets so crazy, people are dressed up goofy parading around in the streets, rickshaws are carrying around nerds to here and there… it’s really quite something. I’ve been to a few, pretty large conventions in Houston, but nothing like this. The outside world is oblivious to what happens in the convention centers of my Texas hometown, but Comic-Con is so big it can’t help but spill over to the general populous with its influence, good or bad.
After dinner we headed back to the convention for a late night “Kung Fu Extravaganza.” Some Kung Fu doctor/expert guy was there showing clips from old goofy ass kung fu movies he deemed were awesome. They were pretty entertaining, and for some reason the creators of Kung Fu Panda were there (who were actually pretty cool, but I’m still going to skip out on that one thank you very much), although after an hour and a half of that coupled with two days of walking around I decided to call it a night.