桜祭り

Transportation troubles aside, Washington D.C.'s Cherry Blossom Festival was actually pretty good.

I got up at 6 AM (yeah, there's a 6 in the morning too apparently), had the awesomest breakfast ever, consisting of Stonyfield Farms Organic Fat Free Chocolate Underground yogurt and Coke Zero. Met up with CAINE at 7 AM. An entire car didn't show up. We were supposed to have three cars and 15 people, instead, we had two cars and 10 people. We gave them 10 extra minutes past our originally scheduled launch time, determined that they weren't going to show up, and left.

I topped off my gas tank just so I could be sure I wouldn't have to get price-gouged later near D.C. Decided I'd try out the Kroger gas station instead of going to my usual one, and I think I ended up saving more. Kroger lets you save $0.03/gallon (if it were Verizon, that would be 0.03 cents, or three hundredths of a cent, Verizon fails at math) with your Kroger card, but when I scanned it, it said "use $0.10/gal. savings?" to which I said "yes" and got gas for $1.85/gal instead of $1.95/gal ($1.92/gal with Kroger card).

Fast forwarding past transportation issues, we met up with a CAINE graduate who lives up there (contributing the third car mentioned in my last post and later on in this one as well), successfully navigated the clusterfuck of people buying Metro passes (while getting our own passes) and got on the Metro. Federal Triangle is the perfect station to get off at, it dumps you right in the thick of things at the Cherry Blossom Festival. We got some taiyaki (fish-shaped pastry with sweet red bean paste inside) and met up with one CAINE member who was already up in D.C. for whatever reason. Then we looked at our watches (or cell phones, kids these days) and noticed it was right around lunch time, so we went and bought everything else we could find with "yaki" in the name: takoyaki (fried dough balls with octopus meat inside), okonomiyaki (a pancake-type-thing with vegetables and stuff), and yakisoba (fried noodles).

After eating we split up to go peruse the festival. Apparently I was the only one required to be on the buddy system since I was the only one that didn't have a cell phone. Whatever happened to the "okay at $TIME we'll meet back up right here" tactic? We found a place selling manga and artbooks where Citrus got a Lucky Star manga (I was thinking it was a doujin because of the decidedly non-official cover art featuring Konata and Kagami, but it was rather thick and had 4koma in it at one point). We wandered down the way bypassing all the really expensive stuff and the beer gardens (I would have gotten some if Kirin wasn't the official sponsor of D.C.'s Cherry Blossom Festival, I much prefer Sapporo). Apparently some people see any event that's remotely Japanese in nature as an opportunity to cosplay, so there were some (no doubt roasting, it was actually warm out when the wind wasn't going like crazy) people in costume.

At the other end we walked past a booth where they had Rock Band, DDR, and Wii Sports going. Katsucon's booth had Guitar Hero 3 (seriously get with the times, World Tour and Metallica are out now) where I took a two second look at the screen (lots of ambient noise, couldn't hear it) while two people were playing and determined solely off of the note chart that the song they were playing was Through the Fire and Flames. When we got closer, my ears confirmed that. I never actually played any GH after that, but whatever.

We spent most of the festival wandering back and forth from one end of it to the other, each time noticing things we hadn't before. After a while, we got out of the crowd and walked over to the Washington Monument where they have a whole bunch of cherry trees that were still in bloom because we didn't time going up there horribly like last year. So we relaxed for a while, took some pictures, and watched people flying kites and stuff.

After that we made one last sweep of the festival, this time actually using the "okay, at $TIME we'll meet up right here" tactic, which didn't really matter because most of us went back to the booth that had the manga and artbooks. Honya (whose blog the pictures linked above are on) trolled Citrus by not actually being able to buy an artbook that both of them were looking at until the last second when he found out he could actually use a credit card. Well played, sir, well played.

Back on the Metro, we decided that the Orange Line trains out to Vienna were a little too crowded (from the experience of trying to find a parking space, I guess everyone else had the same idea: "Hey, let's park at Vienna and ride the Metro!"). So since the Blue Line stays right with the Orange Line for a while, we decided to get on that instead (it was a bit less crowded). Except we missed the transfer point and had to come back. But whatever. Getting on the orange line (at Rosslyn, for anyone who's got a D.C. Metro map open right now), the trains were still crowded as hell, except this time people were getting off. We didn't position or time ourselves correctly for a while, and finally just said "okay, everyone just spread out and GET ON THE DAMN TRAIN, we'll regoup at Vienna." Except that the next train after that, we all made it on.

It was around 6 PM at that point (and if you haven't been skimming, you'll realize that I'd been up for 12 hours and was driving), so we were discussing getting food. Some of us, including myself, were like "omg let's eat asian food" while the rest of the group just wanted cheezburger. We debated for a while, I realized that asian food is more expensive than cheezburger and switched opinions, and we ended up caravanning to Fuddrucker's. I got a taco salad, and was making horrible takoyaki-tacoyaki (both are pronounced the same way) puns for a little bit before I decided that I'd killed enough of my friends' brain cells. Having never been to a Fuddrucker's before, it was a little strange. They give you one of those little wireless things with the LEDs that go crazy when they finish your order, and they have a completely non-understandable PA system. The LED thing seemed arbitrary as to whether or not it would go off (mine didn't), I just happened to barely make out "Chris number 6" over the PA.

We ate, I made sure that my last drink was caffeinated (it didn't really help), and we left for Charlottesville.

The I-66/Route 29 interchange has been redone recently, and I must say: If you're on I-66 West and wanting to get on Route 29 South towards Charlottesville, it's now a lot more obvious where you should get off. There's a sign that says "Exit 43A 29 South Charlottesville" and another sign before it that says "29 South Gainesville Warrenton Second Right". I managed to keep it between the lines, dropped everyone off, came home, and then got a weird boost of energy out of nowhere and made the post about Google Maps and checked a few other websites before going to sleep.