The wait is OVER! My Midori arrived over the weekend and it is so lovely...
The pictures don't really do the whole thing justice. The box is banded like the actual Midori and has a little note tucked in that's adorable:
Please write down at random what you feel or what you think in the cafe you dropped into during your travel, which will surely be your precious treasure. Besides, you may find a new feature every day, going to work, having this notebook in your hand. It may change your life!
So cute. I'm planning on using mine more for trying to organise myself, to house a 'normal' journal and a review notebook but I do think that when we go away in September, I'll pop in a notebook to use as a travel journal to stick in tickets and receipts and other travel paraphernalia and break out the Midori for the purpose for which it was intended.
Anyway, the starter kit comes with a cloth bag to keep the notebok in. Obviously there's the notebook itself - I went for black, which seems a bit less popular than the brown but is more to my taste, and the regular size, which is slightly taller than a regular paperback and slightly narrower. There's also an alternate band (red for the black notebook and orange for the brown), which I've put on because I like the red against the black.
Everything that the internet says about the quality is just spot on. It's lovely :) It doesn't smell leathery (which I think I'd find off-putting in a notebook) and it's really flexible and soft, despite being thick enough that it feels sturdy.
I actually can't tell you much more - I had a few plain inserts ready to go (one that came with the starter kit and two that I'd ordered from Etsy) but I'm still waiting for some inserts that I've ordered to arrive before I can really get into using it much more. I've ordered an 'official' Midori planner insert (week to view with an extra page each week for lists and the like), a folder/pocket type insert and...some other things that I can't remember anymore. In the meantime, I'm using the plain Midori insert as a journal and another as a review notebook but they're not banded properly in because...ah, because the extra bands are also in the order that's en route!
Immediate verdict: SO PRETTY and so much potential.
Next up: INSERTS! (See how swept up in this thing I'm getting?!)
