talim

We left early the morning of Friday, July 10. We had a long trip ahead of us as we would be flying from Clark Airfield instead of the traditional Manila International Airport. Tiger Airways is a budget airline and it would be cheaper to fly from Clark. Sese's parents arranged for someone to drive us to Clark. We packed our things and off we went. I was so full of excitement that I could barely take a nap despite my lack of sleep the previous day.

We arrived earlier than we expected so we decided to eat lunch in the mean time. Sese's mom was kind enough to treat us to lunch before she sent us on our way. Cabalen buffet for the win! In fact we were so early that after lunch we still had to wait outside the terminal before they allowed us to check in.

Travel tip: for those flying abroad as a tourist, prepare PhP 1620.00 for your travel tax. Filipinos are required to pay this for all travels outside the country and they do not accept foreign currency so you need to have pesos handy. We also got charged an additional PhP 600.00 for the terminal fee. Customs and Immigration here really make a killing that it's almost unbelievable. After passing through Immigration, all we needed to do now was wait for our flight. 

We've been planning the trip to Singapore for many months now. I have often told my friend Sese that I wanted to be able to experience a convention outside the country as I have often found conventions and events here to be disappointing. Often our local events focus more on ticket prices and sponsorships than actually creating an event that would really cater to their audience.

We finally decided to attend Cosfest VIII (2009). Cosfest is Singapore's largest cosplay event held every year in July. It also hosts the Regional Qualifiers for the World Cosplay Summit held in Nagoya, Japan.  There have been attempts to hold regional qualifiers for the Philippines, but as we have not been recognized as a participating country, we can't really send our own delegation.

The original plan was really just to attend the event. But we thought, why not have someone from our group join the cosplay competition and see what it is like to compete in a foreign country.  Now our group has cosplayed here and there but none have really joined a competition so we weren't really sure who was up for it.  After some thought, we decided that our very own Ice Artificio would be perfect. 

Now that we knew who would be going, we had to decide what character to portray.  We couldn't choose just any character.  We needed a character that would represent the group and something that will make people say "WOW" if we did it.  After much debate, we chose Talim from Soul Calibur IV.  We thought what perfect way to represent the Philippines is with a Filipino character.