Hello and Happy New Year to everyone!

I recently lost both of my old trusties (a Pelikan for writing & a Sheaffer for signing) on one of those miserable trips where everything seems to go wrong... Productivity wen down drastically. Soon the whole office was commenting on how documents were piling on my desk and nobody could get a signature out of my door. Unfortunately, Vietnam is not a happy hunting ground for anyone looking for pens and my search for replacement led me to the Net then Elephant & Coral in Singapore where my pen box was replenished with another Pelikan & a Sailor and my wallet became somewhat lighter... This being the holiday season, with some spare time on my hand I was soon back on the Net and got hooked on this site after looking through the reviews on Nakaya posted by Laurel.

Lovers of fountain pens are few and far in between in this corner of the world. I am so glad to have found the FPN and look forward to hearing from you all soon.

Welcome to the FPN!!!!

Jim

Welcome to FPN.

John

Thank you Jim & John for the war welcome.

Hello and welcome!

I live in Jakarta, and also do a bit of pen and ink shopping in Singapore. If you are going back again and want to buy other pens, just do a search on 'Singapore' on this forum: there have been a few posts about some very cheap outlets (art supply shops and so on); good places to get a wide range of inks (Aesthetic Bay probably the best); and even one or two leads if you are in the market for, say, a vintage Parker 51.

Does Vietnam have much of a tradition of fountain pen use, as China does? Someone told me that provincial bureaucrats still sometimes use them.

Hi Viv,

If you've read Laurel's review then there's not much point in asking what's on your wish list...

Welcome to FPN! Were your pens vintage or new? What models? What models did you get to replace them?

Welcome to the forums. If you search around the net a bit, you can find some reasonably priced, beautiful pens. Thanks to the internet, location does not have to be a barrier to owning nice pens.

In the past Vietnam has a fountain pen tradition (and the desirable pen to have then was a Parker!). Nowadays, virtually everybody uses ballpoint, rollerball ..... As I mentioned before, in my company of more than a thousand staff, I am the only one using fountain pens and am regarded as a bit of an ccentric old geezer for that.

The pens I lost were a black Pelikan 1000 (F nib) & a black metal body Sheaffer M nib (sorry I bought it a long time ago & used it daily without ever checking the model & lineage). Both were reliable & trusted workhorses that have been with me for number of years and although they were not irreplaceable vintage items, it felt like losing old friends...

I replaced the Pelikan with the same model in green with Broad nib & the Sheafffer with a 1911 Silver Sailor EF nib (first Japanese pen for me).

And you were right, now that I have seen Nakaya, I think I am done for. I am ordering one and eyeing up another daily on the Net. Please, dear husband, feared bank manager, somebody, anybody....stop me before I face certain financial ruin!!!!

Welcome to FPN.

Thanks!