Pacific Media Expo 2010 Recap

We attended PMX earlier in November 2010 (yes, this post is extremely late)  and we all had mix feelings relating to the event. Maybe because we have been spoiled by all the large conventions that has been offered throughout California and PMX might have been just a bit too small for our liking. Also the event was rather unorganized with the every event running late and coordinators not knowing what was actually going on but overall it was still an entertaining convention with its pros and cons like all the other events we attend.

This year, PMX was hosted at the Pasadena Hilton Hotel, parking was $10 at the hotel parking structure with validation and there were plenty of validation machines scattered across the convention. Now parking was not an issue and reaching the hotel lobby where the convention was located took less than 5 minutes.

Once we were inside you could see people, photographers and people in cosplay/lolitha fashion scattered throughout the hallways and lobby, almost shoulder to shoulder. There was not any clear signs to direct traffic to certain areas but we carried a map of the convention in hand, which really was not needed at all. We picked up our badge and it litterally took us less than 10 minutes to walk the entire convention or rather, the hotel lobby, hallways and rooms designated for the convention (the spoils of attending larger conventions). Unfortunately the dealer room and artist alley was running behind on schedule and was not opened until an hour or so after the start of the convention.

One of our first stops was the room that had the Pocky tasting and Sake tasting on Saturday.

On Friday, Pocky tasting was $2 to taste 10 different Pocky flavors but on Saturday they raised the price to $5 for the tasting. According to them they were not fully set up on Friday, thus the price changed; we were rather disappointed. After the Pocky tasting, we walked around taking pictures of the cosplay and sat in some of the video showing rooms, just to kill some time until the panels and main events.

PMX had two main ball room, on the left, held all the panels, masquerade, concerts and dance; on the right held the Filipino Stick fighting and the carnival event. The room that held the panel was decently sized but unfortantely it was not correctly sized for the masquerade, concerts and dance because it was a bit too small for such an event or rather the size of the speakers placed in there. The sounds bouncing off the walls and speakers was just a bit too loud and was almost deadly to ears, which was not very pleasant. Now fortunately and also unfortunately, the concerts were actually free to attend but that was only because local bands were playing. We also attended the masquerade which was not as entertaining as others that we have attended before. For the dance event, which was held at 9pm, was also rather disappointing because the convention was pretty dead by that hour and only a handful of people attended the dance (roughly 10 – 15).

On the right ball room, we attended the Filipino stick fighting but it seems that the event was all on its own. It was like PMX rented out that ball room specifically for those people to have their own fighting event because there was multiple fighters going at it and family/friends cheering them on with no sort of announcements. Now for the carnival event, we did not attend because it cost extra to go into the carnival event and when we were outside peeking in, it was pretty empty and did not spark our interest.

Overall, like all entertainment conventions that related to Japanese pop culture, PMX had the usual large variety of cosplayers running around but the Lolitha fashion did dominated this convention or rather was more noticeable. Although we did find many disappointing aspects of PMX, the people that we met and encountered will always make these kinds of events memorable.  Hopefully next year we will have a better experience. You guys can check out more pictures of the event below.

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