Our resident writer Amichan has compiled her top five highlights of Minamicon 14!  Enjoy!

People
At the end of the day what makes a con work is the people, everyone who I had chance to talk to were friendly and were happy to talk to me.  A big thankyou should be given to the Committee and Gophers who kept the convention running smoothly and mostly to time all weekend.  You guys particularly made me feel welcome on the Sunday evening with your offers of plum wine and unusual t shirts!

Akemi Solloway
I have met Akemi before both at Amecon and Alcon, this year at Minamicon she really pushed the boat out by hosting a number of events including Calligraphy, Japanese language, Japanese Culture and Tea Ceremony lessons.  I attended most of these events and all of them were deeply fascinating.  The main thing that makes Akemi so wonderful is that she is passionate about her culture and you can talk to her about pretty much anything related to Japanese culture.  An example of this was the Kimono that she wore during the weekend which was passed down the generations from her grandma to herself.

Cosplay Masquerade
The masquerade at Minami was the most enjoyable one I have watched in a while.  Why you ask?  When I first saw that it was 2 hours long I wondered what on earth was going to fill that time as even if every cosplayer joined in it would simply not take that amount of time.  I then started imagining strange and wacky ideas such as the committee ambushing poor unsuspecting hotel visitors and changing them into the most skimpiest costumes imaginable.  This, no matter how funny the case would of been, was not what happened.  The masquerade was instead broken up with comedy performances (for example the excellent Squeenix Eye for the the Straight Guy) and with excellent AMV's.  At the end of the event the awards names were made up by the judges and then awarded.

Party Games
This was amazingly good event to open up on the Friday as you often played random and crazy games such as Haruhi Twister and Sgt Frog Piñata with people that you did not know.  Hence you were able to get to know new people pretty quickly into the weekend.  Unfortunately, my short skirt stopped me from playing Twister...

Maid Cafe
In my recent visit to Japan I went to 3 maid / cosplay cafes.  Safe to say nearly two months after I returned to the UK this cafe helped me to fulfil a craving for a short period of time!
 

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