I fondly remember the school garden where I tried to phonetically repeat the songs heard in Japanese cartoons. Shaped by all the beautiful things gleaned from them, I find myself enchanted by the artists of Japanese music a few years later. Only in college, after meeting countless extraordinary people who spoke Japanese, did I decide to learn it myself. But just as the animated characters taught me, I lacked friends with whom to share all the information and ideas accumulated over time. Thus, I came to the Romanian-Japanese Studies Centre “Angela Hondru,” where my interest in Japanese culture and language reached its peak. Through the new skills cultivated there, I joined the Free Spirit Travel team, with whom I stepped for the first time into a magical realm where I never thought I would go – Japan.