London MCM Expo, May 2006

MoonShadow writes:

It was a pleasant day when we arrived at the Expo on Friday. Setup was relatively painless; once it was over, we went to our hotel room to chill. The room itself was small, but the window offered some very nice views of the dock.

Evening made for a pretty sunset; we ate at the nearby Chinese, where I discovered that two pints of Tiger beer followed by half a bottle of wine is actually quite a lot of alcohol. Having ended up relatively unfit for subsequent conversation, I amused myself by taking photographs of twilight fading to night. London can be quite pretty at nighttime.

The next morning was very hectic. Expo filled quickly; I found myself doing a lot of errands, and the Sweatdrop table was continuously busy. One of the errands was to drive out to pick up more white tack for putting up art competition entries on the wall; since it was Sun Kitten's birthday and I had been plotting for some while, I leapt at the chance to pick up her cake without suspicion and palm it off to a friend who had agreed to help with the arrangements several days previously.

Eventually, towards lunchtime, I found a little time to look around at the interesting stuff for sale. There was still quite a sizeable queue outside! I picked up three DVDs of Starship Operators, which I am looking forward to seeing; and, randomly, volume 2 of the Black Cat manga (volume 1 had already sold out everywhere!).

Remembering past disappointments in the concourse - including bland overpriced curry and extortionate cardboard noodles in a posh box - I decided to try a different approach to lunch this year: I discovered what could only be the staff canteen in the basement. The only way to get to it was through the N1 bathrooms. Four quid got me a "meal of the day" - all I could eat of chips, mashed potato, fried chicken and alleged salad, along with a drink of my choice, served by a depressed-looking lady with an eastern european accent. It was pretty dire - but, I figured, let's face it, the stuff upstairs probably wasn't going to be a great deal better.

Early in the afternoon, the art competition wall was already starting to look pretty full. Here are some of the entries that caught my eye:

[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7]

Evening followed, complete with another sojourn to the Chinese restaurant. The waiters had been all in favour of my plots, and duly presented the cake while singing "happy birthday" - to an empty seat, since I hadn't had a chance to tell them whose the birthday was and Sun Kitten had briefly left the room! The repeat performance went very well, though.

The next morning was another hive of activity, filled with cosplayers and daleks - thankfully, though, no terrorists, albeit the poster did remind me of Bruce Schneier's rant. Between the late start and the sheer busyness, it was soon time for lunch. Deciding against better judgement to give them one more chance, I braved the staff canteen once more.

The depressed-looking lady with the Eastern European accent smiled as she recognised me from the day before, and went out of her way to nuke my chips specially rather than just pile on cold ones from the tray like everyone else got. I sat at the back, next to the broken television, with the cool breeze from the fire exit that opened onto the bare concrete pillars of a disused loading area deep in the building's foundations blowing over me.

The chips were flaccid, and the burger tasteless. Watching the haggard lady order her Asian crew about to serve an influx of men in Star Trek uniforms with their platefuls of chips, I was reminded of a page from Lipson's Russian textbook.

I left them my change as a tip. They will probably find it a refreshingly novel experience.

The afternoon passed in a mad flurry of competition entries. We had taken down all of the ones from the previous day at the end of the day; but the walls were already full again by mid-afternoon. Here's a selection:

[1] [2] [3] [4]

Still, I did manage to find time to grab a second-hand copy of Tenth Kingdom I spotted on one of the non-Anime-related stalls.

...and then, suddenly, it was over. At teardown time, lots of drawings were found abandoned around the tables..