Wednesday was a long, but rewarding day. I began the day with my Folklore tutorial where our professor taught us how to make St. Briget's crosses. It is not too difficult once you understand how to create it, but it certainly took me a while to get the middle to look right. St. Bridget has a special holiday set around her, which is why we made the crosses. for the rest of the day I movie marathoned the first two movies of the Hunger Games Trilogy, and headed with a group of friends to see the premiere of "Mockingjay: Part One" at Odeon theatre. Honestly I think it may be the best one yet and will totally promote going to see it. The Hunger Games trilogy is my favorite book series after all.
In a previous post I may have mentioned the anime and manga convention known as Eirtakon that I was going to be attending in late November. Well that was actually this past weekend, and it was great craic (fun). The convention lasted from Friday night to Sunday mid-day, and I attended with some of the people in the Anime and Manga society. We only went on Saturday though due to some errors with our accommodation plans. To make up for this, the society held another Lock-In on Friday night that was Naruto themed in commemoration of the ending of the long-running series. We watched the anime, played Naruto video games, and read Naruto manga. We also played some more Werewolf and Mafia (for more information check out previous blog posts). After a few hours of sleep we caught a bus and headed to Dublin for the much anticipated Eirtakon! Once in the city we stopped in a mall to grab some food where I witnessed the greatest Christmas display I have ever seen in the food court. There were lights everywhere and animatronic elves, Santas, polar bears, and snowmen. I was thoroughly impressed with how elaborate it was. After eating we headed to Croke Park where the convention was being held, collected our wristbands, and the con commenced!
After looking around at all of the merchandise and buying a few things the three of us headed to the first event that we were interested in seeing called the Cosplay Masquerade. It was an event that you could enter as a contestant if you were cosplaying, and go on stage to present your work. A panel of judges who were also cosplayers then would rate each cosplay as they were presented. A winner was picked for categories like 'best group', 'best makeup', and 'best prop'. Cosplaying is pretty much dressing up like a character from a show, movie, book, manga, or anime. The majority will be movies and anime though. They can be very simple like wearing something that is store bought, or it can be quite elaborate where each piece is created by hand and includes props. Some of my favorites were the characters from "The Nightmare Before Christmas," A few Studio Ghibli characters (No Face, Princess Mononoke, and Kiki), a group of "Fairytail" members, and all of the Disney characters. Some of the costumes were incredible and I am blown away by the talent that it took to create them. The overall winner of the contest was a cosplay of Maleficent from the new movie. She had her full set of wings, and it was breath-taking. The three of us then headed to the information desk to buy tickets for the biggest event at the convention: Hatsune Miku and Friends. We arrived at the place where they had started queuing for the show, and waited about twenty minutes until they began to let people in. They handed out some glow sticks as well, because the room needed to be dark in order to see the performer. We were in line a bit late, so we were seated towards the back of the room. Then the show began.
Hatsune Miku is a huge sensation in Japan. She is a pop star that sings all of her songs in Japanese. She is actually an animation that is projected like a hologram for special shows called Vocaloid concerts. You can find a ton of videos of her on Youtube, so I suggest looking her up. It is really awesome what technology is capable of. She also performs with a live band, which is an added bonus. Every now and again her friends will come on stage and do a song or two. She had about eight friends perform at the concert. I thought that the performance was incredible, and it was difficult to not be impressed with how well everything was timed and done. Hatsune Miku would do everything that a pop star would do, including big entrances, talking to the fans, playing instruments, and dancing while she sang. The three of us ended up moving around a lot, because she was difficult to see from the back of a room. The show really relies on being able to see her, so it is hard to appreciate it from a distance. She performed for about two hours, and then came back for an encore. By that time we were all very sleep deprived, so we skipped out on the encore, grabbed some food, and all of the society members decided that we were ready to head back to Limerick.
Fun Facts and Information!:
#1: Mockingjay actually premiered in the USA on Thursday night at midnight, so I saw it 29 hours before my friends back home did. #2: The Festival of St. Brigit takes place on the eve of January 31st to the 1st of February. The original Brigit was a goddess that was associated with agriculture and fertility. The second Briget was a saint. The crosses themselves are made on Bridget's eve.
#3: I took a picture of some Christmas lights in Dublin. It reads 'Baile Acha Cliath,' which is Gaelic for 'town of the hurdled ford' or 'Dublin.'
#4: My souvenirs from the convention are in the final picture. I got an Aperture Laboratories (Portal 2) sticker, a Totoro plushie keychain (My Neighbor Totoro), a Pokemon theme song sticker, and a bookmark with owls from the four Hogwarts houses (Harry Potter) from the Artist Gallery.
