Back in 2006, when I was this common kid watching Yu-Gi-Oh, Dragon Ball and Digimon passionately, at some point in my Mew Mew Tokyo childhood stage, I wondered, what would it be like if I actually made a costume of this magical cat girl Momomiya Ichigo and bragged around my class? And so it happened I grabbed some old clothes, pushed my grandpa into buying me a pink shirt so that I can butcher it into Ichigo's top, and combined some red knee-highs with my red shoes to make boots. I made a rather funny lookalike of the original costume, complete with Strawberry Bell weapon and Mini Mew as my sidekick. I trolled people in school, went up to my classmates, saying 'meow' and other funny stuff from the show, made all the other Mew Mew weapons for my friends and I had tons of fun in general. Sadly, my mother never liked anime much so she threw my costume away very soon, adding how that kind of cartoons is bad for me. I was 12.

Five years later, I ended up going to this festival Japanizam to check out what was it about. I've heard a lot about it, and decided to go see for myself. Among other things, I saw a costuming and performances contest, something called 'cosplay'. After two years of worshiping this newly discovered concept, I stepped out to Belgrade Book Fair 2013 to a casual cosplay event. Today I have more than 15 cosplays behind me, and I'm glad to be on board the Sakurabana club, which organises these very cosplay events. I'm telling to myself that I must've done something right.

Oh, and I did manage to salvage some pieces of my archaic Ichigo costume. I swore an oath to cosplay my long lost dream one day, when the opportunity shows itself.