Monde des Stylos

While I have not been updating this blog much recently due to a heavier than expected workload in my day job, much has been happening in my journaling activities as well as in the wider community. For a start, Pelikan Hub 2025 was on 24th October 2025, a little over two weeks ago. In the South East Asia region where I live, we had the inaugural Malaysia International Pen Show (MIPS) held on 27th and 28th September in Petaling Jaya , just next to Kuala Lumpur . The first ever Singapore Pen Show will be happening on the last weekend of November, but I will have to skip this event in my home city because I will be overseas during that weekend. In addition, the Tokyo International Pen Show (TIPS) is currently happening this weekend, 1st to 3rd November 2025. I attended last year's edition of TIPS and it was my first time attending a pen show. What an eye opener! On a personal note, despite a promise to myself to buy less and instead spend more time enjoying the writing instruments t...

This was my very first time attending a pen show. I did not actually planned to attend this event. But somehow, my travel dates to Japan in autumn of 2024 coincided with the show. Realising this, I gladly took the opportunity to include the show into my travel itinerary and through social media, managed to get in touch with a kind gentleman based in Tokyo who helped me with my event ticket booking. Thus, on 3 November 2024, I attended my very first pen show, the Tokyo International Pen Show (a.k.a. TIPS). I woke up early on the Sunday morning of 3 November 2024. My Japanese friend, a fellow fountain pen user, arrived at my hotel lobby and together, we walked to the Monorail Station to travel to the pen show. Arriving at the venue's reception, we showed the QR codes for our tickets and were assigned wristbands before being led to join the queue based on our ticket numbers which also indicated our schedule arrival time. As with all things in Japan, everything proceeded like clockwork...