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I used to use fountain pen when I was in Secondary One.

I still remember the first fountain I bought that time was “Hero” (China). It is a basic fountain pen, with squeeze-suck inking reservoir. I did not remember which ink I used, Pelikan blue, or Schwan blue?

Why I decided to use a fountain pen that time? During my school day, ballpoint pen was already popular and widely used. I still remember the most used ballpoint pen for students at that time were economical ball pens liked Pepermate (RM0.50) or Superline 712 (RM0.30). A better choice would be Red Leaf (RM0.70) or Pilot (RM1.20). A fountain pen was not an economical writing instrument at that time. The “Hero” costed me RM6.00, and the bottle of ink was around RM1.90. My pocket money was RM0.50/ day at that age.

I am always a BIG stationery fan. My favorite activity during the school recess was to visit the stationery stores near the school. I save my money for beautiful pencils, pens, notepad or even erasers (the most expensive purchase was a Papermate stick eraser which I am still using now).

My mum told me during her school time, she is bound to use fountain pen, which they called “ink” pen. It was even compulsory to use fountain pen during school examinations. The unique way to hold while writing with the fountain pen attracted me very much. The filling mechanism of the fountain pen raised my interest too, as I was always fascinated with “advance” feature of the stationery. These motivated me to go for my first fountain pen.

However, the writing experience was not as great as it was thought to be. Maybe I was too young to appreciate the beauty of fountain pen. The “Hero” nib was found scratchy on my school exercise book. I spent most of the time trying to clean the pen nib to make it shiny without any ink mark, liked an unused pen. This wasted a lot of ink and toilet paper of course. The ink in the pen reservoir could not even last until the end of the school day. Eventually I switched back to ballpoint pen, without even finished that bottle of fountain pen ink.

The moment I was reintroduced to fountain pen was over the past few months. I was reading a lot of office supply blogs during my search for my dreamt Filofax (I was in love with Filofax for a long while and was kept looking to buy one. I will write something about my Filoafax too).
Then, to my surprise I always came across reviews on a fountain pen named Lamy Safari. The reviewers cannot stop praising this fountain pen on how wonderful the writing experiences it gives and how reasonable-priced the pen is!

Hmm…I decided to give a try on Lamy Safari. Lamy is made in Germany, which is the first thing I like. I have been having a lot of good experience with German made stationery, Faber-Castell, Staedtler, Rotring….And now shall be Lamy!

I looked into local stationery store in Baku…not found. So, I ordered my Lamy Safari online from "Lamy Pen Shop". I chose them because they provide shipping service to my home country, and the shipping charge … I can say is cheap. Usually the online retailer will request an international shipping charge end up more expensive than the goods itself. I ordered 2 nos. – 1 yellow EF nib and 1 charcoal black F. The fountain pens come with free convertor too. This means I save again for paying extra for the convertors. That made me very satisfies with the purchase. I am actually planning to buy 2 more from them (1 shinny black and 1 AL-Star). The sad thing is they are not offering pink and orange color anymore. I have the 2 pens shipped to my home country, Malaysia. After the purchase, I continued coming through the good comments on how fascinating experience Lamy Safari give to their owners.

Since I will only go home at the end of the year, this mean, I can only experience the pens in 5 months time. I decided to do another purchase during my visit to U.K sometime earlier this summer. I bought a white Lamy Safari medium nib. But this time I have to buy a convertor. With the purchase I bought 2 bottles of Lamy ink (blue and black). I prefer the ink bottle over the refill cartridge because I enjoy the fun refilling the pen with pumping or sucking. In fact, this is the sole privilege you can have when using the fountain pen.

Same as most other Lamy Safari users, I can’t tell you how much I am pleased and enjoyed writing with my Lamy Safari. The words just can’t describe the good feeling when holding to this pen. The nib is so smooth and juicy. The ink flow is effortless. The pen is actually slightly bigger and odd-shaped than standard pen, but the grip on it is extremely wonderful. The pen design is so simple that it only concentrates on giving the writer the BEST writing experience.

Writing with this pen, I don’t care about the handwriting anymore, or the look of the pen. I just want to keep writing on and on. It is the joy to see word and text continue appearing in lines of paper.

Using a fountain pen, I am open to experiment different types of in

Before buying this pen, I've owned a bunch of pens, really bad ones. Then one day out of the blue, I decided it was time to get a decent fountain pen, even if it's the smallest and cheapest Pelikan I could find.

This is actually the third M150 I've owned. Lost the first one after using it for several years. Then bought the second one a week after losing the first one. It lasted not more than a few weeks - lost that one.
I bought the third almost right away. I think this illustrates quite nicely what I think of this pen.

It's small and practical. Or impractical if you count in the loseability factor :(. Some people prefer heavier and bulkier pens - well, this one is none of those things. But it's reliable, it's affordable, does not break, the pump works just fine, writes smoothly, and the more you write with it, the better it writes.

It's common knowledge that a fountain pen shapes itself to the user's hand. It'll probably take you a week or so to get any real results out of it, but after that it'll just keep getting better and better. For the same reason, avoid lending it to anyone.

ps - I use Parker ink and Pelikan ink on moleskine paper, and was told to avoid Leonardi ink.