Inconvenient convention

I don’t talk much about free time because first I see this blog mainly as a place to document what I have learned when working on abroad and secondly because some parts of my free time is something that I’m not allowed to mention in a school blog. I can mention that usually me and Mira spent time shopping clothes and video-games in our favorite shops like in a secondhand game shop where the cheapest ps3 games costs around 2$. We drink tea and eat cake in nice cafes, when it’s a good weather we sometimes draw outside or just walk around the town looking for new interesting places and shops to visit. When the weather is bad we draw at home, or watch series like “the New Sherlock Holmes”, “Fargo” or every Finns favorite “Pasila” (Because I’ve never watched it).

So yeah we don’t always do something special or huge but for this weekend we got to do something awesome. As I mentioned before we had bought tickets to Comicon and this was the day we would go there!

Source

We woke up super early so we would get to train that would leave at 7am. Everyone had complimented the train route because it went next to the coast and because of that the view would be great. Our host fathers even gave us special transportation-cards, so we could get discount from the train tickets. We walked a while and then went the rest of the way with taxi, because we were in a hurry. At the train station we heard that all of present-day trains were cancelled but we could take a bus that would take us to another train station which would take us to our destination: Belfast. It was a bit of a hassle but luckily we managed to get to the bus which was supposed to leave at 7am also. Actually I ran to the bus and asked them if they could wait while we buy bus tickets.

So our travel started with a bit of transportation problems. At least on the other train station we saw some cosplayers and knew that we were heading for the right direction. When we got to Belfast we had to walk from train station to King's Hall where the convention was held. Of course after a long trip we were hungry. There was lots of cute cafe's and fancy restaurants. We went to Subway.
We also asked how to get to Kings Hall and the Subway staff and some nice elderly couple advised that we should take a bus to get there. Then the elderly couple looked us a little closer and the woman said: "But with your legs it might take less than half an our." And so we walked to King's Hall with our long legs. Luckily it was good weather because I had forgotten to take my umbrella with me..

Finally after a longish walk we were at the Comic-con! There was lots of people, some nice outfits (thought it wasn't as much as in some Finnish conventions). It was interesting to compare the differences and the similarities between Finnish "Cons". The whole large hall was filled with different stalls that were selling anime, figures, plush toys, self published comics, art prints, even real life weapons, but strangely no manga. Maybe in Britain they appreciate more anime than manga. Personally I like manga more, but of course I ended up buying loads of anime-series and -movies.
We walked around the convention, exploring every stall again and again. It was really fun because I've always wanted to go to a convention abroad, although we were told that Belfast's Comic-con is actually kind of small convention.

We even saw Spiderman (But don't have any good pics of him)

We stayed till the end of the convention and then went to search someplace were we could eat. It had started to rain a bit but when we finally were at the same Subway as before it was pouring. And we were soaked. We ate and tried to dry up a little. We didn't have any idea when our train would leave but near the train station we saw our train standing on the station. We ran so it wouldn't leave without us. But unlike the bus, the train didn't wait. We had to wait a while for the next train, under a shelter, still soaked and freezing.

But in the end the train arrived. With wet clothes we sat in the train once again trying to warm up a bit. Of course the trip wasn't over because we knew that we would have to get to a bus to get back to Derry. Apparently we had much more like with buses than trains, because we didn't have to wait the bus to Derry at all. We just walked in to a bus, bought tickets and soon it started to head back home. But it still wasn't time to rest because Derrys train/bus station was on the Waterside and it was still raining. We really didn't want to walk home. So we found a nice little Chinese food-restaurant and asked if they could call us a cab. After a long day we were home around 10pm. Our host fathers wanted to hear how our day had went. We told that it was fun but at that moment we just wanted some dry clothes. We made some tea and of course filled our hot water bottles, as our host fathers recommended.

Picture from the Jazz-festival.

There was also a Jazz-festival in Derry from Thursday to Sunday. So we enjoyed the Sunday walking around Derry listening some big-band and Jazz music. It truly was an eventful weekend. Of course we also agreed that we would go eat Chinese food some other day.