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| Otakon - Author's Notes -
2007 |
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Two days after Otakon was over, this writer got an e-mail
message asking about pictures on this site from the convention's first
two days. Unfortunately there were no pictures, because we were stuck
behind a desk on Friday and Saturday night. Our
Tuesday-through-Saturday work week kept us behind a desk on two days
when we would have rather been in Baltimore, so we were able to attend
the convention on Sunday. On top of that, our notebook PC stopped booting three days before the convention trip, and we had to head to Otakon without a way to get material online. The machine wasn't restored until Monday morning and we didn't get pictures online until Monday afternoon. These notes were not posted until Wednesday evening, as late as we've been in recent months. Fortunately, what little time we spent at Otakon was productive time. We got a couple of hundred costuming pictures online from the people we spotted in a half day at the convention. Otakon cuts its final day short when compared to other conventions, and those who attend have to be determined to get as much as possible out of a short amount of time. That might explain why the dealers' room looked packed around noon on Sunday. The convention was busier than we expected on the final day; it looked as if Sunday was busier in 2007 than Saturday was in 1999, the year that Otakon moved to Baltimore and used the original, east half of the Baltimore convention center. There was a surprisingly large crowd to get into the Sunday concert by the Eminence string ensemble. Everything we heard about attendance sad that the number of fans who attended was a little larger in 2007 than in 2006. This year, the Baltimore Orioles were out of town so there was no baseball competition, although the city had an arts festival that might have drawn some attention from Otakon. There also was a Harry Potter double-header with the release of the new movie and final book in the series on the convention weekend; some speculated that the Potter competition kept fans away from Otakon. We didn't see any Potter costumers in our brief trip to Baltimore. Otakon is supposed to return to Baltimore in 2008, and the experience could be different because of the big project to the convention center's west. For years, city officials have criticized the convention center for being an undersized disappointment and said Baltimore needs a major convention hotel to make up the difference. That hotel was well under construction during Otakon – a skybridge that will link the two facilities was nearly complete – and it should be open on the first full weekend of 2008 when the anime convention returns. If Otakon's organizers can convince the new hotel's operators to be part of the event, that could mean a different kind of convention near year. This writer's only disappointment during the trip was the mediocre food served by a highly-touted restaurant at the Harborplace food court. We learned why there was no one in line to eat there when the crab chowder they served was little better than grocery store tomato soup. But that Harborplace is the crowning glory of Baltimore's comeback from urban failure. It rivals the glittering rebuilt downtown of Tampa, where we had traveled a couple of weeks earlier for Metrocon, and the rejuvenated Long Beach harbor. All three places have been converted, at great expense, from areas where no one wanted to go to major tourist attractions. Without those revivals, the convention centers where the anime events were held would not have been built. |
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