Rain, rain, go away, come again another day. UCLA's anime club, Cal Animage, announced at Anime Los Angeles' Ouran Host Club gathering that they planned to have an Ouran themed party on campus at the end of the month. Of course, Tom could not make it for that event. So, I filled in to cover the UCLA Ouran Party. The even was held on January 26, 2007 at the heart of the UCLA campus. It was right outside of Ackerman Hall, the student center.

I went to this event with Stan (as Bossanova) and Deb (Honey). Luckily, the weather was clear on that afternoon. About 30 or so showed up to the event. Even a few (rival) USC students showed up for the UCLA event. The UCLA campus had very nice architecture. Jack, the Kyouya cosplayer suggested we take advantage of the location for photos.

For the first part of the day, we gathered out doors. We used the picnic tables in the main quad. We then met up with our other friends - Julia and Caitlin (as the Hitachi twins) and Jason (as Honey). We also made a new friend, Camille (as final episode Haruhi). While the event was a Host Club theme, there were still other anime cosplay respresented such as Naruto and Hitman Reborn.

The day we happened to have the gathering, high school tour groups of potential UCLA students were walking in and out of the quad. Many of the high school students were jazzed to see Ouran Host Club cosplayers, and know that UCLA has an anime club they can call a second home. I thought having this event was a great way for UCLA to promote their anime club. My former schools, Sonoma State and San Francisco State's anime clubs never had a get together akin to this mini-event.

Photos from the outdoor portion:

We then moved inside Ackerman Hall. We moved all the food and drinks up the stairs to a room in the student union. Someone had brought a UCLA Host Club cake. Of course, both Honey cosplayers (Deb and Jason) were ready to tear it up Honey style. Artists took advantage of the white board and drew mini manga scenarios. Someone also had brought their stereo and several people danced to the long version of "Hare Hare Yukai," or the Haruhi song as many people know it.

What would be an Ouran Host Club party without tea? We joked around that the UCLA Host Club stole the tea packets from the cafeteria for our event. For lunch, the club treated us with El Sbarro pizza from the student center. Thank you for the grub!

While there was nothing wet falling from the sky, Julia and Caitlin requested a photo shoot. After all, Jack did tell us to take advantage of the location!

And then I proceeded to give Deb a photoshoot...

And Stan...

And of course, more pictures of your's truly as Haruhi...

And you can't go wrong with group pictures. It's great to be cosplaying with friends from the same series...

The event ended sometime after 4PM. We originally though of going to downtown Los Angeles for dinner in Little Tokyo followed by karaoke. The plan did not really work with Julia and Caitlin. So we settled for going to Universal City Walk. So far, it's been a tradition for Deb, Stan, and I (and whomever is up for joining us) to hit Bucca DiBeppo. Of course, we were still in cosplay by the time we arrived. We felt a little weird. Last time we went, we spotted Naruto cosplayers outside of Bucca DiBeppo. Yet, since we just came from a gathering, and we were all in one big, happy group, might as well go for it.

Good Italian cooking is good Italian cooking. I decided to mess around with the flash on my new camera. Hence why the quality of these photos differ from the rest. It was a great dinner. We were so stuffed by the end of the day. Afterwards, we went to EB Games. I was very amused by the Simpsons Movie game as Homer Simpson had to beat the crap out of chocolate bunnies from The Land of Chocolate. Unfortunately, the night ended short when it started to rain. No pictures of Honey at the candy store! ;_;

Otherwise, it was worth it to spend one short day at UCLA. Thank you very much, Jason and Jack for organizing this event. If only the anime clubs at my former universities had something fun like this!

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