How we came to love cups so much!
Hello everyone! In this blogpost, we are going to share our favourite cups with you! These are from our personal collection and we’ll talk about how did we found and fell in love with them.
P.S. We are not affiliated to the any of the brands, but just love them deeply. keke
It all started in May 2015 when we (opus 44 and long day) went to a flea market (can’t remember the name now. our hostel owner recommend it to us!) in Bangkok, and came across a stall selling cheap ceramic wares from Japan.
The wares are probably cheap because they were defects but we fell in love instantly with this one. The colour, the texture, and shape were perfect to us!
So this became our everyday coffee cup! Every morning we’ll sip hot coffee from this cup, pretending we’re living in some wintery country. But after the initial excitement faded, we realised the cup gets too hot to hold and we wished it had handles..
Too much to handle
That same year in November, we backpacked Kyushu for 3 weeks with the main quest of train-hoping and looking for beautiful cups to bring home.
Arita, it was! Home to Japan’s finest pottery ware. There was an unusual cold front that winter. And us, two lost, freezing Singaporean souls navigated the little town of Arita on a rainy winter day on rented bikes, wearing the only gloves we could find - gardening gloves (the sell durian kind). The pain was unbearable but was worth it because we would soon find our next everyday cups that would last us the next 6 years!
It was love at first sight.
We fell right in love with the shape, size and the colour of it. And yes! It has handles! (no more burning fingers, ouch ouch). Even till now, Arita Jiki still remains our favourite cup (unfortunately they now stock new colours, so these turquoise and coral coloured cups are no longer available :( ). It’s perfect for coffee, and we’ll explain why in our later post!
Coffee-stained, chips and scratches… just shows how much we loved them. And we love them more with these imperfections!
The perfect cup
At Arita, we also came across Arita 1616, another really amazing brand. We bought 2 cups and chose the ones without handles as we were already quite broke, and they were cheaper. But on hindsight, I (stingy long day) wished I’d splurged and bought the ones with handle so that we can drink hot drinks from it.
Fun fact: We love the cup so much we still can’t bare to use it! That’s 6 years and counting. Haha. This is the reason why this cup is not stained with coffee yet. And it shall remain in pristine condition forever. hahahahahaa.
Another fun fact: Arita 1616 can be found in 2 places in Singapore. It is stocked at Supermama. And Kurasu uses them to serve coffee.
More fun facts..? Or opinions?
Not far from Arita, is Hasami, name of the town and famous cup brand. Hasami cups comes in two types - a smooth glazed finishing and a rough finishing. And something we’ve noticed from using it, is that the cup makes the taste of coffee slightly more robust and darker, especially the rough one. And this is another reason why we clinged onto our dear Arita Jikis even after it’s shown signs of wear and tear.
Come back home
Since this important year of our lives, we started amassing even more cups (not all made it onto this list).
Then in 2019 we found our next set of favourite cups. This time, not coffee cups, but glass cups! And in Hock Siong! For those who don’t know, Hock Siong sells beautiful secondhand furnitures.
We stumbled upon these vintage Aderia parfait-footed glasses and Ocean glass cups, and we’re sure you already know how the story goes.
These cups are precious, so we only take them out when our friends come over (and we sneakily start to keep them when we sense that they are getting too drunk). haha
And here we are now, 6 years on
a lot of cups and the beginning of an online store called open day, we’re still collecting but also sharing with you! Ending this post with our 2 current everyday cups - HMM W Glass for opus 44 and Big Shore for long day.
If you’ve read this far, you’re amazing!
thank you for reading too much, haha
drinking too much,
openday