I’ve been busy the past week working on things for International Wota. Head on over there to check out IW’s official Anime Expo coverage where we have summaries of the day’s events as well as transcripts and photos from the H!P events.

Now on to day 0 of my AX adventure.

Well, I spent a total of about 7 hours in Canada on Canada Day. But that’s okay… I was heading out to LA to see Morning Musume!!

That morning, I went to bed at around 2 am because I had to finish packing. I woke up at 3:45 am to get ready to head to the airport and we were out the door by 4:30. Our (I was heading to LA with my brother, johpan) flight was scheduled to leave at 6:26am. The following 2 hours were ridiculous:

5:15am EST: Arrived at the airport.
5:45am EST: Got into the customs line up.
6:10am EST: Got past the customs line.
6:12am EST: Got into the security check point…. And guess what? johpan got picked for one of those random bag checks.
6:20am EST: Announcement on the PA – Last call for our flight. johpan’s bag was just getting put through the x-ray machine again.
6:23am EST: johpan’s check is finished… RUN!!!!!!!
6:26am EST: Got to the gate. The attendent at the desk tells us the plane’s door has been closed. No one can board anymore. I gave her this completely helpless “WTF DO YOU WE DO NOW?!” look (okay, maybe it wasn’t a helpless look… More like a completely panicked, OMG WE’RE F’D look XD)… She looked at us, looked at her screen… Took my boarding pass and looked at my passport. “6D and 6E. HURRY!!”

With that, johpan and I dashed to the plane’s door, and they re-opened it for us. You don’t know how relieved I was to get on that plane.

6:45am CST: Arrived at Chicago O’Hare airport for our 8:05 am connecting flight.
7:55am CST: Boarded our flight to LA.
8:30am CST: While taxi-ing on the runway, this crazy woman refused to buckle up her child. The flight attendant threatened to sent the plane back to the gate. They had this ridiculously long argument, and I’m not quite sure if the kid ended up buckling up (I was a few rows behind the woman, so I couldn’t see) but I was seriously worried that we would get delayed, seeing as we avoided a bullet just by getting to Chicago.
10:20am PST: Landed at LAX. We were delayed getting to the gate, but that was okay. The press junket wasn’t scheduled to start until 1pm (with registration starting at 12:30pm).
10:50am PST: Finally got into the airport. Our cousin wasn’t there to pick us up yet. He was stuck in traffic.
11:05am PST: Check the arrivals list and saw a flight coming in from Tokyo into our Terminal (Terminal 7).
11:12am PST: Got a text message from CK letting me know he got an e-mail saying that Morning Musume was just arriving.
11:40am PST: waiting to see people get off the plane. Unfortunately Morning Musume was not on that flight (they arrived on another flight from Tokyo which landed in the Tom Bradley International Terminal).
11:55am PST: Got picked up from the airport by our cousin.
12:35pm PST: johpan and I arrived at the Westin Bonaventure for the Anime Expo press junket and picked up our press badges. We signed up for interview slot #4 for Morning Musume (approximately 1:45 PST).

The Westin Bonaventure Hotel – Morning Musume’s hotel

12:45pm PST: Met OpsMonkey of Selective Hearing. It was quite exciting to meet our first wotachatter for the trip.
- Insert a massive delay waiting for our Morning Musume interview. When it got close to 1:45, I was shaking like a leaf, but it seems the girls took a while getting to the airport and getting ready for interviews. I don’t think they started with Morning Musume interviews until after 3 pm. Somewhere in the midst of this wait, we met daigong of JPH!P with some of his crew. I didn’t get anyone else’s name though… -
3:35pm PST: We were called by AX staff to the holding room for our Morning Musume room.
4:30pm PST: The same AX staff member came into the room and said he had good news and bad news for us. The good news: Some of us were going to have our interviews expedited. The bad news: Morning Musume’s handler was picking and choosing who would get to interview Morning Musume next. So basically, signing up for slot number 4 was null and void.
5:05pm PST: AX junket over

We went back downstairs to look for OpsMonkey and found him sitting in one of the waiting rooms with people from JPH!P and Paul from Hello! Blog. It was quite exciting to meet him as well, for his was one of the first Hello! Project blogs that I stumbled upon. It was either through his blog or MorningBerryz’s blog that I found International Wota in the first place. We were all obviously quite disappointed that none of us got an interview with Morning Musume, but there was still a whole weekend filled with Morning Musume events to go through.

So, we all went our separate ways…. To head to the same place. XD johpan and I walked to the LA Convention Centre to pick up our tickets to the Morning Musume concert.

We saw the most awesome (and huge) Final Fantasy XIII ads on the side of a building during our walk… I wonder how Ai-chan liked these ads. ^_^

Just as we entered the LA Convention Centre, we met up with Bryan and Jen of Hello! Ranking. We didn’t get to chat with them for too long, though for they had many preparations to make for Friday’s Hello! Party. We got into the massive line, and near the start of our wait, we got in touch with CatchFiveBats of Obnoxious Wota and he met up with us in line. Even without the Morning Musume interview, it was turning into quite the epic day, just getting to meet all of these people who until then we’d only known through a chatroom, the random skype conference call and wotachat picboard.

Hanging with the guys in the AX ticketing line

We waited in the AX event ticketing line for 1.5 hours, and during the wait we also met up with another blogger – Kirarin☆Snow ☃ of MiniMoniMania. Our tickets for the show: Section C, Row 10. Holding that ticket in my hand really let it sink in that in just 2 days time, I’d be seeing Morning Musume perform live! This is something that I’d been dreaming of since 2001… I just knew it was going to be epic.

And that ends day 0 of Anime Expo. I didn’t get to meet and interview Morning Musume like I had hoped, but there was just too much to look forward to that I couldn’t dwell on it for too long.

Coming soon will be Day 1 – The opening ceremonies, a pre-opening ceremonies sighting, and Morning Musume’s Q&A panel. Stay tuned!

*Note: all photos in this post were taken by johpan, but he was using my digiSLR, so I’m allowed to steal them. ^_^*