Saturday, April 12, 2014

Saturday Adventures

As I said yesterday, I had plans for today, and I actually followed them. I feel weird saying that the day was kind of a bust, but it turned out to be not very exciting and, in the end, a little annoying.

My plan was to go to the Marble City Comic Con downtown, and to the Rossini Festival, also downtown. Further complicating this plan was the fact that today was also the Orange and White Game, a free football exhibition game on campus that attracts around 60,000 people. I had to drive past campus to get to both of the other things, and figure out where to park. A little planning solved this problem: I left the house early, parked at one of the public garages while they were still setting up the festival, and then walked the couple of blocks back to the convention center for the comic con.

The downside to this is that I might have gotten to the Comic Con a little too early, because it was boring as hell.

Some of the vendor booths weren't open yet when the doors opened, and the ticket booth opened late. There weren't many people in costume when I was there, and really there just weren't that many people in general. Some of that may have been due to the Orange and White Game, but I still think I was just too early. I got a good price on a few issues of "Superman's Girlfriend Lois Lane", including one so bizarre that I've read it twice and am still not entirely sure what happened, but didn't find any of the specific things that I was looking for, which was a little disappointing.

I did see some famous vehicles:

land speeder

Batmobile

but eventually, like Wonder Woman, I got bored and left:

wonder woman

I walked back uptown to the Rossini Festival, but I was disenchanted with that as well. There was dancing:

dancers

and singing:

singers

but also a lot of crowds:

Gay Street

and, honestly, the festival is badly organized. Instead of having an area for food and beverage booths and one for craft and art booths, all of the booths are mixed together at random. Even worse, they now have some kind of food ticket system, and most of the food vendors are ticket only even though they have signs that have prices in dollars printed on them.

This culminated in me, thirsty and a little hot, being told by the girl at the Rita's Italian Ice stand even though the sign said four dollars they only took tickets and the nearest booth to get tickets was five or six booths away, but I could totally come back after I had tickets.

You know what else I could do, girl with misleading signs?

I could go in the Union Avenue Grocery and just buy a drink, which I did.

I saw this cute art on my way back to the car, though:

graffiti

so the day wasn't a total loss.

I just feel overall disappointed, like it was a waste of effort to leave the house.

1 comment:

Marcheline said...

When my mom and my husband and I took a vacation up to Mystic, CT we had absolute fun every day... except the last day we were there. There was this farmer's market advertised in the local paper "with MUSIC! and TREATS! and FUN!" - you get the idea. In my head, it was going to be like one of those country festivals. We got there, and it was four tired vendors with some green beans, pumpkins, and jam, about thirty people milling around wondering why the hell they wasted a day coming there, and one dude sitting on a folding chair playing a guitar and singing.

Sometimes it just beez like dat.