AFA 2012

It was an extremely tiring weekend and thanks to having an extended weekend up to Tuesday, I'm glad I've got the time to recover. Not sure if I had woken up at 5am on both days is due to being overly excited or a messed up body clock, nonetheless my daily reserve of energy was sapped out quickly at the event.

Rushed to the event on Day 1 at around 8am and even as the doors only open at 9am, the entrance was already crowded with people and I quickly rooted myself to the ground and wait for the sweaty, hot and stuffy one hour to pass. This was actually the 1st time I had squeezed together with the early-goers for the event as I usually would head to the event slightly later to avoid the crowd. Seems like with an agenda this year, I could actually push myself to squeeze with the crowd. On both days, the Madoka movie starts at 9.30am in the other Hall so I've got around 30minutes to grab my goods before heading to the movie. Unfortunately, none of the 2 to-buy-item was in stock. And thus I headed to the movie empty handed and prepare to look out for bargains after the movie had ended.

Day 1 was pure goods hunting, queueing for shops here and there which quickly squeezed all my time away. To make the already tight schedule worse, my Day 1 activities included stage events which meant that I had to slot in time to visit the stage to make my stage ticket worthwhile. The worst and longest queue I was in was the Madoka Movie shop. That itself took me 1hr and 20minutes just to get into the store. Tried my luck on a Kuji there and got the simplest of prize. It was still a movie special merchandise so why not? :)

so basically thats all that I got from the 2 days in AFA. Most of them were in Day 1, where Day 2 I had only got myself a Madoka Half-Age Character and a WS AB Vol.2 booster.

Headed 1st to Kurocha! to grab my card sleeves (like finally) and then went to KKnM which took me about half an hour to get into the shop and luckily for me, I spotted that awesome wall scroll / tapestry as seen above. It wasn't on display in the shop and it was the only one left. And its REALLY quite big. And then, its nendo hunting! Had intended to get a Kyoko nendoroid but I believe the price was still high or that the stock was cut thus there wasn't any at the event. And then I spotted the BRS TV. vers nendoroid and after comparing prices across 3 shops, I took the cheapest one and tadah! Its here! My very 1st nendoroid! Shall leave it in its MISB condition for now due to the lack of proper display cabinet that could turn my nendoroid dusty and stuff like that so I'll just wait a while more...

Day 2 was more of a photo taking day since free hands w/o any goods makes it easier to capture photos. With experience from last year, using only auto-focus for some of the figurines was a bad idea as they tend to focus on random areas even with the focus area being already expanded. Things become blur and worse when it comes to complicated figures and gundams as well. Thus, I went ahead with manual focus all the way for this year and after browsing through, it was pretty hard to get the perfect sharpness but it is better than auto focus too. Gotta train more in that and perhaps tweek the shutter speed too.

its quite a handful of photos and since blogger tends to lower the quality, I've uploaded them onto fb and its a public album, just not that sure whether the link below works :X

http://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10151242830398166.487329.538578165&type=3

Overall, the 2 days has been fun, the movies were awesome, the goods I got made me happy and its really great! However this year it seems that the event hall was smaller than the ones in Suntec City Convention Centre as it was quite obvious that there were lesser merchandises on display and many shops had their area  reduced. And it was quite easy to breeze through from one end to the other end, unlike in Suntec. To offset this, there were much more stores that pique my interest this year and thats a positive thing :D

Well, AFA 2012 is over, see you @ AFA 2013!