Wow it’s been ages since I wrote about my sojourns. Today it’s Tokyo. As a lover of all things specialty coffee, it comes as a surprise to me that in my latest trip abroad, coffee was last in my priorities. One week in Japan (spent for work) allowed me for relative freedom to explore Tokyo after attending various seminars, tours and workshops. Call it the initial shock therapy of a new country (it was my first trip to Japan) as the reason for not being able to focus on caffeine.
Hello. Just a quick update. I’m blogging. Again! It’s been a long, long road since 8List back in 2012. Just this week, the team at Manila Bulletin soft-lunched MBLife, which is essentially our own agile experiment at our millennial marketing efforts.
From the lighter side of Manila Bulletin, we welcome you to MB LIFE, our latest lifestyle portal among our ever-growing portfolio of new products. Yes, there are articles. But more than that, we choose to be a bit more self-aware by welcoming you into our home, namely to our curated collection of “very nice things.†On one hand, there are toys. Lots of them. Absent of pretense, we open our ever-growing toy collection to the public eye through our TOY SHELF section. Then there’s the nostalgia. Being in the most unique position of having chronicled news in the Philippines for the past 116 years, we open our doors to the prized archives of historical front pages, photography, and vintage ads through NOSTALGIA MANILA. These, together with our bite-sized web documentaries, tutorials and slice of life (the agonies and the ecstasies) op-eds comprise our daily dispatches for the everyday millennial.
Check us out!
This piece originally appears in full in the Lifestyle Section of The Manila Bulletin.
There was nothing but excitement as the escalator took me up to the floor of Arrozeria at the Century Mall. Known for its paella and other dishes focused on rice, the venue of choice piqued my (blooming) sensitivities to expand my palate. This was the lunch venue of Cheryl Tiu’s “Cross Cultures†food tour, a movement to experience the food we don’t often see (or taste) very often. For lunch, we had Rachaleve’s Kenyan Cuisine behind the counter. Her full name is Rachaleve Kamau, born in Nairobi and like many foreigners with similar origins stories of landing in the Philippines, fell in love with Manila in 2009. She lives here part time, sharing Kenyan cuisine in dappled regularity at bazaars and catering.
In this technologically evolving world, it’s easy to forget about the technologies that got us to where we are today.
Many of them aren’t obsolete in the way the floppy disc or cassette tape is. Simple inventions like the ink pen continue to be as relevant today as they were when they were first introduced. They continue to have a very important relationship with humans, and the way we think and record our thoughts and feelings. Here are three reasons to think about making handwriting more a part of your life, as well as a suggestion to let uni-ball provide the pen you use to do it.
(1) Handwriting is the most tactile form of recorded communication. There is something about putting a pen to paper and using it to map out each character that represents a thought, which is useful in turning that thought into a memory. Typing just doesn’t have the same physical connection to higher thought. Perhaps this is because handwriting is so difficult to learn for the first time. Children labor at it in school, trying to get their clumsy fingers to mimic the motions necessary to craft neat print and cursive.
(2) Handwriting is personal. It’s a uniquely human form of recording words. Computers can generate their own text, but an individual’s handwriting is as unique as her fingerprint. When communicating from the heart, nothing works like handwriting.
(3) Handwriting is beautiful. Handwriting can achieve a nuanced beauty that a typeface never could. There is a place for both, of course. But without handwriting, written communication becomes tragically uniform.
Uni-ball is trying to reclaim handwriting for a new generation, providing the best pen experience you’re likely to have. Click here to see some of the pen options that uni-ball brings to the table. Next time you need to make a note or write a letter, do it with uni-ball.
A Manila Bulletin Video Production
Farming has been the long-standing primary livelihood for the family of Maximino Legaspi, a native here who hails from Barangay Malasin ― he breathes it day in and day out, and it runs in his veins.