giveaway packing ideas

There’s nothing quite like the excitement you get when you’re opening a gift. For me, it’s half of the gift already!

If you’re one who have good hands for doing handicrafts, it may be worth to consider wrapping your giveaways in a way that would really delight your guests, even with just the packaging per se.

Saw these in a rack in Family Mart. Okay okay I admit I got attracted at first because it has our wedding colors lol. πŸ™‚ But the gift wrap ideas are really lovely, aren’t they? If I’d receive something akin to these as a wedding giveaway, it’d probably take days before I’d open it and that I’d probably make sure I had already taken pictures of ALL the angles before I’ve opened it up. πŸ™‚

Pretty aren’t they? Especially the orange one.

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Lupicia’s Kotobuki

Finally had the time to drop by Lupicia in Kamiooka to cater to a w@wie friend’s request to canvass for particular flavors. One of her recommended flavors was Kotobuki and goodness, the smell was just so good I ended up buying five packs haha. Four of them are gifts by the way. Loved Lupicia’s packaging for our principal sponsors giveaways. But I love this new packaging as well, which can be a nice giveaway for secondary sponsors.

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As I have a cat’s tongue (Japanese idiom for a person who cannot drink nor eat anything hot), I had to let my cup of tea go cold before I can take a sip. I don’t mind really, since I can take my sweet time smelling the tea. A sensual experience, especially if the smell is as good as the kotobuki.

By the way, kotobuki ε―Ώ means long life or congratulations. Fitting for weddings I might say.

we’re in tumblr!

A week with our new gadgets and I could surmise one thing – a lot of photo apps has an option for easy sharing with tumblr. Hence, we did the inevitable – create a new space in tumblr that would probably be dedicated more on photo sharing especially when we’re mobile.

One thing ironic though. A minute after setting up our new tumblr account, I discovered that there’s a quick photo option in the WordPress app that allows you to instantly post the photo you’ve just taken. Don’t you just love wordpress?

Still though, I think we might just keep our tumblr account for more documented memories. Cheers to more blogging fun!

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Bunko and Obon

We were pretty much holed up inside our home the whole day. Hubs was pretty busy cutting up his books, scanning it and uploading in his Dropbox application so he can retrieve it in either his iPhone or iPad with the ibunko app. By scanning books, we can save up some room in the house (if a person buys an average of 10 books a week, you can pretty much imagine how his house looks like) and he can read them whenever or wherever he likes. Of course his favorite books won’t be dissected.

So since he’ll be cutting books, you can imagine how big his cutter was. Honestly though, I didn’t imagine the cutter to be as big as this! I was pretty confused with the size of the box when I was signing the delivery form.

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And I was pretty impressed with the scanner Hubs ordered from Amazon. It can scan a back to back paper in just a second, without having to flip the paper to scan the other side like the one we had in the office.

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Fruit of Hubs’ labor today. From iBunko App

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Bunko by the way is a small sized paperback that’s pretty popular here in Japan.

Having had stayed inside the house the whole day, we were surprised that outside our the house, a festival was ongoing in the open field just a few steps from our apartment. Thankful that we had to go out for dinner, otherwise we would have missed this traditional Japanese event.

Obon Odori (γŠη›† η›†θΈŠγ‚Š) is one of the summer festivals in Japan. Obon is the Buddhist tradition of honoring the dead and it involves Odori or dancing. Most of the participants (basically our neighbors) were wearing their summer kimonos.

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It’s a good time for neighbors to bond as well.

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We dropped by the Obon Odori when we were on our way out. Later, laden with heavy purchases from the grocery, we were able to catch the last part of the Odori for a (very) short video.

Happy weekend everyone!

Hanabi

Hanabi, or the Fireworks Display is one anticipated event here in Japan. Yes sure we’ve all seen fireworks every now and then. But there’s nothing quite like the Japanese Hanabi – especially if you consider that these continuous pyrotechnic lasts an hour at the least, with some lasting for two full hours! And it’s not just the length mind you, the organizers go to lengths as to provide displays that can just make you smile real wide like a kid even when you’ve been to countless hanabi in the summer, every summer.

This year though, the hanabi has been more a treat as compared to the previous years. A lot of the usual hanabi events had been called off this year, both as sign of mourning over the March 11 disaster and as cost-cutting as well. But of course, there’s still reason to rejoice and probably it’s because of that that the major Hanabi in certain cities still pushed through.

Yokohama’s hanabi was held this evening. This actually was our (mine and hubby’s) first hanabi together as husband and wife. And so we spent it watching together at the 34th floor of our office where we currently are billeted (pretty ironic yes, that even when our building has 36 floors or so, we happen to be assigned on the same floor though maybe not for long since he’ll be moving to another floor next month for another project). And yes, we were working overtime.

Here’s some of the pictures I’ve taken. Totally unedited (still trying to get to know our new gadget).

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