Moleskine Cahier Pocket Notebook

Since I am predominately a fountain pen user, Moleskine isn't exactly my first choice when it comes to daily-use paper. Over the break, a dear friend sent me one of these Moleskine Cahier pocket notebooks as holiday gift so I decided to make it as my new daily memo book (since the Rhodia pad I have is running low).

That's immersion oil (for high power lens on microcope) by the spine...

  The cahiers come in blank design with beige/black cover and matching stitch binding, it's supposed to be simple and no-frill that you can take it anywhere with you (apparently not near water, since I dropped it in a lake later when I tried to do an elaborated glamour shot, oy). 

There is a back pocket for note cards, receipt and things like that. The corner are rounded so the cover handles wear better. There are 30 sheets of off-white, textured and seemly fibrous paper with medium (as in non-faint) gray rule.

These artwork of Russian cityscape (drawn by Zhenya Vassiliev...) is transferred onto the notebook by my friend (don't know how) since she knows I am mildly obsessed with all thing Russian (mainly pianists, ballerinas and poets). Hmmm, I wonder if she would get in some copyright issue since it's a one off item and not for profit...

The first 15 pages are normal pages while the second half are all micro-perforated. 

I have heard plenty of stories about Moleskine's encounter with water-based ink so I am not surprised to see how the ink (De Atramentis J. S. Bach, a watery ink that bleeds more than others) feathers and bleeds through (do I even need to include the picture?) like a mofo. Anyway, since the paper texture is quite different from the other Moleskine I own (the green lego notebook), I suppose the quality isn't uniform across the whole brand. 

Overall: Meh...I guess I can still use it to jot down the location of metaphases (the number in the above pictures)?