First Impressions: Midori Traveler's Notebook

So this year we started off by getting ourself a Midori Traveler's Notebook after much contemplation last year. The ability to customise how you wanted the notebook to be was really what appealed to us in the first place.

Only...getting a notebook wasn't so easy, as we either had to try our luck at Kinokuniya (we haven't been inside to look for it yet...) or order it online from a local supplier like Pipit Zakka. Ok so it probably isn't as difficult as needing to order from Amazon and wait ages for it, but we're still pretty much the kind who prefers walking into a store and checking out the physical product.

But oh well. We placed our order with Pipit Zakka, it got posted to us soon enough (well packaged too we must say!), and now we are a proud owner of a Midori Traveler's Notebook as well.

With...only a blank notebook insert that came with the notebook, a lined notebook we bought, a zipper pocket...and that's pretty much it (it's so popular the online store was out of stock of half of the accessories).

Thankfully we've been watching some video reviews of the notebook and got some ideas from them. A particular useful one was on using rubber bands in place of the official bands meant to hold the notebook inserts together. Apparently the official bands aren't as hardy too and snap after a while. So we didn't bother with waiting for the online store to stock the bands, and went to Popular to get some rubber bands.

And since the choices of notebook inserts were rather limited to start with, we decided to find printable alternatives online and make our own. Found some pretty good ones to start off with at Wendaful so now we have a nice thick notebook to work with.

And we did hopped over to all three Muji branches to check out their stationery to see what we could get. Ended up with a 3-colour refillable pen and a pen holder, couldn't find any of their notebooks that fit what we wanted.

Let's see how well we adapt back to using a hard book compared to jotting everything down on our iPhone!