Wednesday, 10:00

If you are in a hurry, let me sum up this trip for you: We went to Japan. We shopped. Then we were done shopping. We flew home. The end.

If you have some time to kill (mangaroo dubbed me official trip chronicler, so this is going to be VERY VERY LONG), let me invite you to share all the details of our lovely journey into the world of shopping. ( Japan! Japan! Japan! )

After multiple delays and mishaps, my 200 pounds (or whatever) of books and I are home safely. I am showered and refreshed and about to commence unpacking. More later when my right arm isn't about to fall off.

PS Wednesday overly affectionate, Choco standoffish, as per usual post-vacation behavior.

Obligatory horrific line picture--this is as we were going into the building, so maybe not so horrific

So, we survived Natsu-Komi '11. Well, we elected to skip Saturday, because we were only interested in Tiger & Bunny (assuming it was on that day) and a few novel things. As it turned out (you guys! we are so cutting edge!) Tiger & Bunny is so new it doesn't have a section. But, it's so popular that it's EVERYWHERE. So we hit up a bunch of random tables (also some found on a random blog that listed a bunch of circles doing T&B) on Friday and decided to be satisfied with that. As for Sunday, we divided up and conquered:

Amasaki Yoshimi
Aniya Yuiji
Asou Kai
Itsuki Kaname
Kitsasato Senjuu
Kodaka Kazuma
Kusama Sakae
Miroku Kotoko
Miyamoto Kano
Murakami Sachi
Narazaki Souta
Naono Bohra
Nekota Yonezou
Ougi Yuzuha
Tennouji Mio
Yamato Nase

...only I somehow forgot to mention to spacealien_vamp (who was in charge of Ougi Yuzuha's table) that I needed two copies of Star Right 5, so now I'll be trawling used stores to see if anyone happened to sell it back right away. /facepalm orz

Other than that, we were pretty successful, I think? I, uh, may have been a little too successful. Oh god, my poor suitcases

mangaroo - 59 book, 6 doujinshi
spacealien_vamp - 54 books, 1 doujinshi
wednesday_10_00 - 46 books, 19 doujinshi
sara_tanaquil - 43 books, 9 doujinshi

Who is the loser and who is the winner? You be the judge.

Well, they were, but having the first flight of your trip diverted fifteen minutes after leaving due to mechanical issues is not exactly fun. But I am safely rebooked for a new flight and (barring any other unforeseen events), should make it to Narita only an hour later than my original flight. Won't be traveling with spacealien_vamp, though. :(

OK....I think I have my Japan shopping list pretty much done. No doubt I will be adding things here and there, but here it is: more or less final version

Google docs seems to eat the sheet titles, so:

sheet 1: manga (tier 1)
sheet 2: manga (tier 2)
sheet 3: novels
sheet 4: misc.

Originally, "tier 1" contained manga I definitely wanted to get, and "tier 2" was stuff I figured I would get only if I had room in my luggage/shipping container/whatever. But after a while I started...I don't know, feeling sorry for the tier 2 manga? So I moved basically everything to tier 1 except those that I'm not really planning on getting. (I still might get some of them, you never know, but the plan is to skip them. And don't ask the point in taking a list of things I'm NOT planning to buy--it makes sense in my head, OK?)

The yellow rows designate manga that I researched and decided I wanted to buy (and would forget about otherwise). It's not a true "must buy" category in that there's lots of stuff I do not want to leave without, but I don't think it's likely I'll somehow forget about them. (Series books, for instance, and titles by authors who are automatic buys for me--none of those are yellow.) For novels, yellow designates series books I don't want to get lost in the shuffle (because I have such a huge novel backlog right now that pretty much all the other novels are the same level of "maybe"). Sheet 4 is pretty unorganized and mostly just notes to myself.

I am...pretty sure my suitcases are already crying in anticipation of the abuse I'm about to put them through.