Monday, July 30, 2012

Animes-bg.com's 7th Birthday

On July 28th was held http://www.animes-bg.com/main/ 's 7th birthday party. This is the biggest anime and manga web-site in Bulgaria. So here is my experience form the event.
I met up with a friend - Taho (not his actual name) and we went together to Interpred center, where the event was held. There we met up with my kouhai Suzuki (not her actual name). The party was supposed to start at 11:00h, but there was a delay (which is not unusual) and we entered the building and bought tickets at about 11:40h. There were a lot of people gathered in front of the building and it took some time for everyone to get in so the event started at about 12:15h.
So the event started with a little greeting from the creator and administrator of the web page and announcement of the program. Many AMVs were played between different parts the program and filled the time. 
The most important thing, that was announced during the event, was the start of the publishing of actual Japanese manga here in Bulgaria. Artline Studios are going to start publishing Naruto and One Piece in September 2012 and if everything goes well they are planning to start publishing Bleach and Death Note. It appears, that they wanted to start this project for quite a while now, but they had trouble negotiating with the Japanese publishers. The great thing is that the manga is going to be translated directly from Japanese and will be on a very reasonable price, in my opinion - 10 lv a volume (about 5 euro). I hope that this time everything works out just fine and we finally have some manga on our market.
This announcement was followed by a very interesting presentation on Modern Japan by Eastern Spirit. They talked mainly about Tokyo and the Kanto region, showing many photos of different places.
After that was the cosplay review and I have to say that our cosplayers are becoming better and better with every event. There also were many really good cosplayers that had come as a public and were not a part of the show.
The cosplay was followed by a raffle with many prizes like figures, headphones, t-shirts, hats and so one. Suzuki won a t-shirt.  
Meanwhile Taho had gone playing in the Mortal Combat 9 tournament and won himself a LineAge II art book and a key chain PS controller.
There were many other games like Magic the Gathering and the traditional Japanese game  Go that anyone could play. Taho and I played some Magic the Gathering and it was fun. There was also a cake, but there were too many people, who wanted to get a piece of it that I decided not to try it.
The event ended at about 18:00h, when the final prizes were given away. 
So many things were going on that there was just no chance that you could get bored. Time really passed by fast and I fully enjoyed myself. I think that the only downside is that there wasn't any merchandise you could buy. (not that I didn't buy a figure and some manga that same day, but they weren't bought from the event, so I will be talking about them in some other posts)
Here are the photos I took :)


 Suzuki's One Piece gear
Our pass bracelets that came with the tickets












 The announcing of the publishing of Naruto and One Piece






































This is what the ticket looked like.