There are pens that do not call attention to themselves, wishing only to remain in the background while their writer attempts the Great Filipino Advertising Tagline. This is not one of those pens. Look Ma, I’m blingy. Not a millimeter of the cap was spared scrollwork. The cap also has a “ruby” embedded on top, …
I found this in a 7-storey bookstore on Fuzhou Road. On the third floor, I passed beneath an arch bedecked with flashing lights and neon Stabilo stickers to enter the pen section. The salesladies had no English and I had no Mandarin, so we invented sign language for “No, not the rollerball, the fountain pen!” …
Better than the Cauliflower Festival, whose billboard waved goodbye to me as I was zooming towards Shanghai’s Pudong airport. I was in Shanghai for work, but was lucky enough to be billeted a five-minute walk away from Fuzhou Road. Fuzhou Road is shop after shop of books, office supplies, Chinese calligraphy supplies… and fountain pens. …
Surely no other pen in my care has been this mishandled. The Duke Beijing Opera came in a heavy box. I don’t know where the box is anymore; it must have warped the space-time continuum around it and sunk into a parallel universe. The pen itself is almost as heavy as the box. It is …