Susan (susan-rocket), Jodie (pdutogepi) and I hitched a ride to Coventry station for the Pokémon Anniversary Tour's Birmingham venue. I had fun looking around at the people in the station to try and work out if there was anyone else heading in the same direction. One girl with pink streak hair and a Pikachu bag was a pretty dead giveaway.

With talk of venue-shifting, I'd been expecting a large area crammed with Pokémon stuff. My expectations may have been a bit too high after the thrills of London's Millennium Dome (now called 02 Stadium) Pokémon Tour back in 2000. The event was more cramped than crammed, with desks showing how to play the Pokemon Trading Figure game, Nintendo DS booths that enabled you to download Pokemon Trozei/Link and a TV showing the 8th movie. I picked up a quiz sheet and see how many questions I could answer about Pokémon's history without looking at the poster boards.

While I was doing this, someone from a Yu-Gi-Oh forum came over with two of her friends and asked Jodie whether she was pdutogepi. They showed off their trading models which were very shiny (especially the Charizard, Meowth and Feraligatr ones) - one of the guys threatened to shove his Mareep figure up the other guy's nose . Then they went off and another friend of Jodie's came by (boy, she was popular 8D) and they exchanged some cards. After that, we stood in the line for downloads. Susan got Lugia, I got Latias and Latios (you were allowed to get more than one download if you stood in the line again) and despite Susan's attempts at finding shinies in the Union Room, no one had any.

Following this, Jodie's trading card friend offered to show us where the fan stuff store Forbidden Planet was. This involved getting led somewhere down the busy streets of Birmingham, dodging the survey people. When I finally realised we were going to get lost, we decided to turn back. Good thing too - she left us in the high street. ^-^;

Upon our return we got some drinks to change up some £5 notes into pound coins and went about getting a bunch of Pokémon keyrings from a dispenser. There was a guy with an Ash hat who had been hanging around the dispenser in the hopes that he'd be able to exchange a Rayquaza for a Pikachu (yup, you heard me). I managed to get a Munchlax and a Kyogre, Susan was very happy to get a Rayquaza and Jodie got a Bulbasaur and another one I can't remember.

We were all pretty tired and very hungry after that, and not being allowed to sit down was a bummer, especially when the mall didn't even have any seats. Still, we got back to Coventry, played Mario Kart DS in the car and had some chips.

All in all, a very enjoyable time, despite the somewhat disappointing size of the event.