Connections – After the Fact Discovery, Frankfurt and Tokyo

Just came back from Frankfurt's PaperWorld and Tokyo's Gift Show.  A continuous trip to two different time zones did worn me out a bit, yet new stuffs I discovered and experienced helps to focus my energy positively.  This is so important.  If I were to travel that much just for work and never took opportunities to see things I chose to see, my body simply could not cope with the sheer volume of activities.

Dulton, VW, Key, Stamp, Frame

"To have faith is to be sure of the things we have, to be certain of the things we cannot see".  A Bible verse I always carry with me to see things beyond and to be grateful of what I already have.  Along with the verse, I also carry 3 cameras (a broken digital IXUS, a Polaroid SLR690 and a Rollei 35SE) to give me different eyes to see beyond the obvious.  And I'm grateful I always find peace and satisfaction within.

The first instant I saw this Dulton tin truck in Tokyo I immediately fell in love with it.  I decided to use it to store some of my daily craft items.  I also got this 1952 Volkswagen Beetle for my son, beautiful pastel blue color, he LOVES it!  I got these two things from different places but they have one thing in common which I didn't know until I came back to Hong Kong.  The license plate on the Dulton truck is "1952"!  Magic, I couldn't believe my eyes.

Smoking area and fire alarm

In Frankfurt's airport there were these two things sitting together peacefully.  A blue "Smoking area" sign high above and a red "fire alarm" below.  They have great color contrast, only if you put these two photos together.  Interestingly, "Raucherzone" (a German word for smoking area) and "Feuermelder" (a German word for fire alarm) both have 11 characters, even the English "Smoking area" has 11 characters too.  That was 11:27 am when I shot these pictures.  Now, what about 27?  2+7=9.  "Fire alarm" has 9 characters!  Yeah, I know you can explain everything with numerology but that's a good exercise for me too to find connections between things.  11 = smoking area, 27 = 9 = fire alarm and they goes together like I had this idea when I shot the photo with the clock intentionally included behind.  Now count the number of characters in "Frankfurt"!

Antiques: Polaroids and Bowlings

Frankfurt Hauptbanhof, Globe

The rest of the trip in Tokyo was meticulous hunting of interesting stuffs for our retail customers.  In an antique shop where I get refurbished SX-70 Polaroid cameras (in this photo dozens of naked white SX-70s) they sell old bowling pins too, I took a picture and later at dinner with several colleagues I found 2 of them are bowling enthusiasts.

Darts with colleagues

I stayed in Ebisu, Tokyo as usual.  Almost every night I went to this darts bar called "Lani Girl" to play darts with colleagues.  Guess what, I've never went to this bar with any guy before, there is a reason why they named it "Lani Girl" you know.  So, this concludes my "Connections" post and a fabulous trip too short.  I'll be back to Tokyo in July, I hope to extend a few days to discover more.  Any of you readers out there wanna meet, let's plant this in our minds and things will happen accordingly.

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Bad Travel Agent, Lunch A Phone Call Away

After my 2007 nightmare hotel episode, guess what, this time it is not bad hotel but bad agent's arrangement.  I was heading toward PaperWorld Frankfurt after 11 hours of back aching flight, since there were 4 of us, taking taxi to Holiday Inn Express in town was reasonable, about 30 euros in 20 minutes.  When we got there around 6am we presented our "vouchers" and the reception said "this is no voucher, this is a piece of print out and nothing more".  Well, he searched and searched on his computer and couldn't find our reservation even though we have "confirmation number" written on the voucher.

6am Frankfurt

Then he figured there are two Holiday Inn Express in Frankfurt, one close to the airport, one in town.  So he phoned and found that even though our "voucher" said Holiday Inn Express Gutleutstr (in the city), our reservation was actually Holiday Inn Express Airport!  So we took taxi again, 30 euros in 20 minutes, back to the airport area, waited two hours to get a room just released, then head to Messe in the city again.  So here we go, 11 hours flight followed by 20 minutes ride from airport to town, then 20 minutes back to airport area to check in the right hotel, then 20 minutes back to the city for the show.  Poor agent!  Bad agent!  When is it going to stop.  Well, I had no problem at all for Japan trips coz the arrangement has always been arranged by our careful Japanese colleagues.

lunch a phone call away

Here's an interesting scene before I go into more updates from my Europe/Japan visit.  We went to lunch after 2:30pm one day in PaperWorld Messe, 6 or 7 people queueing up in front of the cashier waiting for somebody to serve.  A black staff stood there doing nothing, a white female staff talking on the phone on something seemed so serious everybody had to wait.  I didn't bring my Lomo LCA+ with wide angle, otherwise it could've been the best shot of real life story.  I figured probably the black guy had absolutely no authority to touch the cashier while the white lady was on the phone.  So everybody including us would have our lunch just a phone call away.

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Usage Comments on City Notebooks

I've been using City Notebook since January for my business trips to several cities including London, Frankfurt, Paris and New York. I love the concept of combining note-taking, maps and travel planning in one little black book and I'm amazed by the growingly strong supporting from Moleskine City web site. However, I had some difficulties with City Notebooks and I'm sure many of you agree at least some points, so I made sure I travelled enough with the notebooks and here's the comments for improvement:

Usage Comments on City Notebooks

Mental burden: City Notebook lacks a full size foldable map which would allow you to quickly locate zones/districts AND street names in one view.  I had to flip back and forth from the main map to find out which page contains the more detail street maps, so in order to locate things fast, I needed to have a mental map of where the large-scale pages are, which is not relaxing at all considering all the places I needed to go in a short trip.  In the beginning I did plan my trip on map (London and Paris) in very detail, but finally I relied on free maps from the airport which has far more details than City Notebook.

Limited street names on map (Where am I?): I think this is the biggest problem with City Notebook.  Just compare the maps with a regular or free map from the airport you'll notice a big difference.  There are not enough street names on the maps!  I had this problem many times: if I'm standing on a street corner trying to find out where I am, I would look at the street signs and locate corresponding streets on the map but gee, the area on the map is empty!  Yup, try to find the names from the index pages, they are not there if they are not on the maps!  So where am I?

Usage Comments on City Notebooks

No street numbers: This is not a common feature on maps but since City Notebook maps are cut up into many pages, I think the feature is very useful since there is space on large-scale city center pages.  For instance, I was staying in New York Holiday Inn Mid-town, which is 440 W 57th Street.  The address doesn't say anything about Avenues and you know New York taxi drivers, they need to know 'W 57th where?', 440 was not enough and you couldn't hear what they mumbled.  So if I knew 440 was somewhere between 9th and 10th avenue, then it would be so much easier to tell them right away after flipping though City Notebook.

Unnecessary scale: The scale of the map is printed on every map, since the maps are cut up into many pages, some of the key locations really sit at the margins and the scale really blocked the view of the street maps!  The scale can be printed on the maps in less intrusive ways.

Usage Comments on City Notebooks

Flipping back and forth: Since all the maps are cut up into sections, in addition to the above trouble to flip from main map to locate a zoom-in page, I have great problem with the London and Paris maps because most of the key locations I needed to visit are sitting at the margin of those little maps.  For example in London, if you walk in the SOHO area between Oxford Circus and Piccadilly Circus stations, you have to flip between two pages and smaller streets' names are not on the maps, prepare to flip frantically if you are not familiar with the area.

Not enough translucent sheets: City Notebook Lacks enough translucent sheets for even just one trip to those who are new to the city.  There are just 12 of such sheets and since there are a lot of map pages, you can't write on the translucent sheets on every map if needed.  Worst, you can't buy them coz they are not available as individual retail refill.

Usage Comments on City Notebooks

Translucent sheets are not for pencils and roller balls:  Since I found that I don't have enough translucent sheets and roller ball ink doesn't dry fast enough, I tried to use pencil on them so that I can later reuse some of sheets, turned out  the sheets are not pencil/eraser friendly either.  If you try to use an eraser to clear pencil marks, the sheets will change from matte to gloss, you can't write with a pencil on the gloss surface anymore.

Translucent sheet too small: If I started to use ballpoint pen on the sheets to mark several locations and suddenly I found that some of the locations are close to the page margin and by moving the sheets to get closer the the margin it would render the previously marked points dislocated, therefore new sheets are needed.  The sheets need to be a bit bigger to cover the margins.

Translucent sheet not friendly to bookmark: If you have two translucent sheets sticked to opposite pages and you placed the bookmark in between, close the notebook and try to open the page using the bookmark, it will slide underneath  either one translucent page and it is clumsy when you want to find something quick.

Things I found City Notebook great though:

• Great concept to plan ahead and enjoy the process, knowing the city before you travel and with support from MoleskineCity blog
• Intuitively combine notes-taking and city navigation with maps
• Retaining measures and conversions info, found it useful in several in several occasions
• Perfect size fitting most pockets
• 3 bookmarks allowing quick access to info

I'm sure Modo e Modo is listening, it is easy to gather more user experience from Moleskine City web site and I hope by the time they print the Asian cities some of the problems can be prevented.

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Longest Clip I’ve Ever Seen

I'm not a fan of cars so naturally when I walked pass a pen booth in PaperWorld Frankfurt 2006, I wasn't impressed by the fact that all the pens there were under different car brand license.  I thought it was some kind of a show off booth which means you probably couldn't buy any of these pens coz they are licensed to sell only in certain country in certain way in certain ….

So I headed to an appointment with Jerry, the second generation of a good Taiwan pen manufacturer (a family business in Taiwan for over 50 years), coz I happened to bump into him when I arrived Frankfurt's airport and he insisted to bring me to one of the pen booth.  I checked the booth number I was supposed to go and I was standing right there!  In this "show off" booth.

Smart Fountain Pen

So Jerry introduced Aguila Brands to me and I walked through Jaguar, Ducati and Smart pen series, amazed by the fact that they are actually not that expensive and very good looking.  Jerry is actually a distributor of these pens, so from that moment onward I was chasing after him for the availability date.  Finally Jaguar will arrive all of our stores in a week's time, while Smart and Ducati will arrive in about 2 weeks from now.

Ducati pen is a little over done in design IMHO, Jaguar is a bit typical, but Smart pen is somewhere in between or you can say just right.  The design is young enough, price is around HKD480 – HKD660 so affordable.  They are hand-made in Italy with an ergonomic heavy metal design, in particular the long clip, which stands out from the crowd and your shirt pocket.  The end of the pen can also be used as a PDA stylus.  All 5 original smart car colors are used for these pens: "phat red", "jack black", "shine yellow", "bay grey" and "ice white".  I'm quite sure during promotion period, for every purchase of a Smart pen, you get one 1:87 toy car matching your pen.

I'm using a "bay grey" one, I like roller ball but the fountain pen is also cute, visit Smart Pens Flickr Set for more images

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