Taste of Japan 2023
There was an event I was planning to go to. It was called Taste of Japan and it was held in the city of Anaheim. It was a free event and I was looking forward to it because I was in the mood to do something. Fortunately, I decided to look up reviews about the event after skipping out on the first day of the event.
Yes, this event was held for more than one day. The first day was an evening thing. The second day was to be a full day event. After much contemplation, I told myself I should go on the second day if I would have to waste money on parking. It didn’t make sense to pay for parking on both days or paying for parking on the first day only to not be able to do, see and enjoy much on that day. So, my decision was made: I would be attending the second day of the event.
The second day arrives and before I decide to depart for the event, I decide to find out what others have said about this event. Fortunately, there were some recent reviews because people that attended the first day decided to leave reviews on yelp. To be honest with you, I actually did check out these reviews ahead of time the night prior and because of that, I kind of knew that it was necessary for me to leave early in order to secure parking. Basically, there were reviews about how people were waiting to get into the parking lot for an hour and then there were people who actually waited an hour and were turned away because there were no parking spaces available. I did not want to deal with that type of drama. If I’m going to go to an event, I want to be able to attend it. I don’t want to go only to have to search for another parking lot, which might also be full since the event is not far from a Convention Center and it’s also not far from Disneyland. So, I decided to see if there were any additional reviews and there happened to be many more not so pleasant reviews which made me ask myself if this event was even worth going to.
If you can’t guess, let me just tell you that I decided to not go to the event because it just felt like there was no guarantee that I would be able to get parking and it seemed like it would be one hot mess of an event. Honestly, I was excited to go to this event but I was not excited to deal with hot weather, parking dilemmas and crowds. Obviously, wherever an event is, there is going to be a crowd, but this was a different type of crowd at the Anaheim Garden Walk.
The event basically ends, more or less, and I decide to check out if there are any additional reviews to validate my decision of not attending the event. All I can say is that I am glad to have not attended the event.
People were not raving about this event and I kind of knew that this would happen based on reviews from the first day of the event. If people are going to say smack about the event when it was only held for a few hours, I can only imagine what the event was going to be like on a full day. So, I made the right decision to not go even though there were a lot of things I might’ve wanted to see, do and possibly even buy.
Most of the comments seemed to revolve around the original issue of there being insufficient parking, the event being poorly planned (obviously) and being overly crowded. Most people are not going to complain about events being crowded because they expect certain events to have a crowd but apparently, this location was not the right location to hold such an event.
I suppose I can’t say too much since I didn’t attend the event myself, however I’m somewhat aware of the area. The parking lot for the event is a no go and it’s something most people somewhat familiar with the area would know. Ideally, this parking lot should be used for the restaurants and businesses that are located at the Garden Walk, however many people use this parking lot for other things. One of those things happens to be parking for the Disneyland resort as well as parking for the Convention Center. This is information you can find from the Garden Walk website itself but I’m sure the average person is not going to be in the loop about this if they have never been to Garden Walk or if they didn’t bother to look into the specifics of Garden Walk’s parking structure. On weekends, there is no way that you are going to have an easy time getting parking at this location if there’s an event being held because you are competing with people who are visiting the Convention Center or more likely, visiting Disneyland. I haven’t been to Disneyland in a long time, so I don’t know what the parking situation is like there, however, I do know that some people opt to park at this specific parking lot.
So, knowing all of this, as much as I wanted to give the event the benefit of the doubt, I questioned how reasonable this event was going to be. I didn’t want to deal with the hot weather. I didn’t wanna deal with not having enough space to walk around comfortably. The other thing that I didn’t want to deal with was how there may not even be seating for people to enjoy performances. Based on reviews from people that attended the event the year prior, people had to stand to watch any performances that they wanted to enjoy and that’s just not my cup of tea. I managed to get a glimpse of what the event was like in a prior year and all I can say is that it didn’t look too crowded. However, it didn’t seem all too spacious either because even food booths weren’t too far from where people were standing to watch performances. I can only imagine how crowded the event might be if many people were made aware of the event and were looking forward to attending the event so I just thought it was in my best interest to not attend the event.
I hope they read the reviews on yelp and decide on a different location in the future to host Taste of Japan. It seems like a lot of people, including myself, were interested in this event and the specific location was just not the right location to hold an event. I hope they take that into consideration because they could possibly bring in even more attendees by choosing a more appropriate location.
If anyone that attended Taste of Japan wants to rant about the event, please feel free to let me know about it or leave a review on yelp, so that the people responsible for planning Taste of Japan can take concerns into consideration and hopefully making the event better and more enjoyable (and accessible) for people to attend next time around.
Image source: eventbrite