Awoostria - My first ever furry convention!

Clearing up some confusion...

This might've not been obvious from my website, but I am indeed a furry.

I've been a part of this community for over four years now, but only really started being more public about it this year, attending local events and walks in differing scales. I was fed up hiding from IRL friends and family and decided to dive much deeper after successfully breaking down a wall of fear.

Why go to Awoostria?

This choice might be an unusual one as it's not one of the more well known, bigger European conventions such as NFC or EF. Looking back at it, going to this "smaller" convention (of still well over 1000 attendees) was a good choice, as the masses of people was already overwhelming enough here.

A friend mentioned they were going here in early March -- I had not heard about this convention up until that point, which makes sense considering it's only at its second iteration and not very local to me, being hosted in Vienna! After looking it up, I decided this would be a great candidate as my first convention, especially considering I already knew a couple people beforehand.

Day 0: Great start before a great convention

My travel to Vienna went super smoothly, departing at 8am and arriving at the hotel by 5pm. Immediately I met a small friend group there and we spent the evening before the convention in the city, grabbing a bite to eat. Afterwards we went back to the hotel and played Uno in the entrance area, with a couple strangers joining in after we posted this picture in the group chat.

Day 1: Absolute chaos (and a breath-taking concert)

Day 1 started out okay. First thing to do after getting breakfast was to stand in queue for registering and grabbing all the goodies that came with my supersponsor ticket! That appeared to go well at first, but what I sadly did not notice until I arrived back home was that they forgot to give me download codes for the two included albums. (I still did not recieve any e-mail reply and might end up borrowing a disk drive to rip the CDs myself.)

Small mistakes like these seemed to be very common - many other people in the Telegram channel confirmed the same issue after I mentioned it, and a friend did not get a poster that was supposed to be part of his early-bird bundle. Hopefully they're going to take the feedback I submitted earlier seriously to minimize chances of human error in the future because this is ridiculous.

What's MUCH worse and seriously ruined my mood was the process of getting into the opening ceremony. The image seen above is a little snippet of what it was like. Sadly, there were three(!) "queues" going on simultaneously, and no one knew if they stood in the right one; the masses of people continued all across every room in the first floor, and up the stairs. People were lining up for hotel check-in, registering, and attending the opening ceremony *at once*.

Staff was absolutely overwhelmed and of no help - in fact they just made it worse, telling me as a super-sponsor with theoretical priority to "turn invisible" so I could walk through the masses of people. Quickly afterwards they "prohibited queueing" ("Queueingverbot" was what was announced in German), but what the hell does that even mean? The ceremony is in a couple minutes, where the hell do I need to go? It's not like you could even make out any queue in the first place, as it was basically all 1000+ people crammed into a way too tiny space. I seriously hope the new location is able to cope better with the growing amount of attendees.

Luckily, the actual event ended up being incredible and made me quickly forget all of this. To make it clear, the events and panels offered by and at the convention are amazing, but they have to get more solid procedures in place to make everything around those events tolerable.

After the opening ceremony was the INCREDIBLE concert hosted by CoVahr, Notefox, Senpai Seishin and Solaris! This was definitely one of my favourite moments of the entire convention! Such an incredible combination of talent, seeing them play some beautiful songs in suit was an experience I won't forget.

Day 2: Disappointing dealers den (but tons of amazing panels and events)

Day 2 was mostly focused on smaller panels, such as Pinsel's photography panel (that I of course had to attend!) and the incredibly fun Feline meet&cheet hosted by Paka!

Another unforgettable experience was at the maid cafe. The last time I went to such a cafe was at Dedeco, a nearby anime-focused event (though I only really went there for the furs). The experience here at Awoostria exceeded that by a long shot! Our server Red (FoxWithAName) was sosososo lovely, chatting with us, giving lots of hugs and even a crappy little polaroid photo!

I also left an obscene amount of money - only having 50 EUR notes with me - at the Fursuit charity striptease, where they raised money for disabled kitties in need. It was quite the experience seeing furs I clearly recognise from earlier local walks in this context, but it was super fun!

Right, dealer's den also opened up on this day. Sponsors got an hour early access, giving us the bonus of having all the stock available to buy first. However, that came with a massive downside - now all various sponsor-tiers came to the dealers den room at the same time and it ended up being overcrowded to a level where I wasn't comfortable properly looking at artists' tables and only got a couple items I noted down from advertisements in the Telegram channel. This made me save money, only spending a total of 35 EUR there, but that kinda wasn't the point.

After that the day ended quietly for me. The paw panel seemed intriguing at first, but it wasn't really what I expected. Additionally I had massive issues getting proper sleep in, even though I never really went to the parties at night, but the reason for my bad sleep quality will be topic for the last section.

Day 3: The cancelled group photo

Right, the group photo. Staff decided to switch the group photo to a video as the weather outside wasn't suitable at that time. I do understand that this was a quick and unexpected change of plans, but again the execution here was awful. Bad enough that I don't want to talk about it further.

I spent most of the day with friends outside of everything that was officially going on at the con, only showing up for the Fursuit Dance Competition (probably the best part of the day), Professional (Fursuit) Photography panel by Pinsel (again), and the wonderful Soft Paws, Soft Songs at night.

Day 4: Saying goodbye

The last day was uneventful for the most part; only the closing ceremony was of interest, and luckily getting in there was much less of a pain than the opening ceremony, so I was able to enjoy it to the fullest.

Afterwards I spent time with friends and slowly said goodbye to them, as my train departure back home was due at 6pm that day. These moments did hurt a little bit, but at the same time I was also looking forward to getting a proper night of sleep again at home. Though I only arrived back in my hometown at 8am the next day, the trains back were awful...

What ruined the entire experience...

... what was even awfuller was only the dude I had to share the room with.

We talked on Telegram for many months prior - everything seemed chill. He offered me to share his double room earlier, but at first I politely declined as I was already planning to stay at an external hotel with another friend. After the friend I wanted to stay with realized he might not be able to come along, I in panic reached out to the other guy if he was still willing to share his room at Flemings, one of the two venues. Luckily(?), that was the case and my place in Vienna was secured, right where all the action was. So far so good.

What I quickly realized was that I should never blindly trust a stranger on Telegram again. If I was only meeting him for a day without being stuck together in the same room for multiple nights, it would've been fine - we wouldn't vibe together and simply not meet up again. But for the convention, I was stuck.

He had issues with both consent and alcohol, opening the first can of beer at 8am. Both of these do not mix well. He got uncomfortably close to me at night without asking, so I politely told him to please ask next time. He wasn't able to handle this and left the room for a couple hours without speaking a word. I was stressing out and gathered all my stuff around the room to put it next to my bed, just in case.

At the convention itself, the issues weren't substantial enough from my view to report them to security. Sadly, things took a tragic turn on the train back.

After I lent him 50 EUR for his missed flight at the airport (or something), he reached out again at 1am where I was inside a packed train, letting me know he arrived home safely. Cool! What's less cool is receiving a random picture of him sitting fully naked on a chair without it being behind a content warning or again, asking me if I was ok seeing that. So it popped up on my screen, inside that train. Even if I wasn't surrounded by strangers this would've been too much, but the situation made it worse. I told him that this was not ok, I'm in a packed train and this uncensored pic of his schlong popped up on my screen. He thought that was funny and quickly sent over a porn gif, at which point I blocked him.

I'm never getting that money back and my otherwise wonderful experience at Awoostria is now always going to come with this disgusting aftertaste.