best card yet

i have been postcrossing for a few months now. so far it has been pretty neat. i write a couple cards every few weeks and pepper them with happy messages to strangers about living in MA, having two dogs, or going to cape cod. i'm never quite sure who is going to get the cards, or who is going to read them since they are post cards, so i don't divulge too much information on them. in return i have received cards from all over the globe that have similar messages. most make note about their city or village and most cards are a montage of pictures on the front. until today my favorite was the card i got from israel. why was this my favorite? because the photo collage included a photograph of a nuclear reactor...at night. how odd. certainly not a tourist attraction in the us. we tend to hide our nuclear reactors behind those fake christmas tree looking cell phone towers. so on today and why the card from israel is now my second favorite. take a look at this card from turkey....














nice card. pretty normal but upon closer inspection perhaps i noticed this:














and then i flipped it over to read the message:














which also made me chuckle. my guess is that those guys on the front moved to turkey to take advantage of the cheap loving and raw sweaty denim.

i guess what they are doing is called kirkpinar wrestling, which is an ancient sport where men are doused in oil and fight to pass the time between marching and invading new territories. perhpas the oil could become a new twist to the UFC. good idea? yes!

cool new job

i received a new postcard yesterday from a 26 year old gal in finland. first i was in love with the fact the card matched the stamp.

and then i read her message...
um. i think i would like to sell postcards via the internet. that sounds like a nice job. thank you miia for the lovely card and the lovely job idea. i will get to work on my new car designs right away.

there was no internet back then

i was reading the day zero blog back during the holiday season. i was looking for a new hobby to keep me off the streets and i was working out some resolutions and goals for 2008. (i was able to come up with a pretty good list. maybe for 2009 i will act on them). anyway, day zero introduced me to postcrossing. the husband thought i was kind of crazy at first (which is normal) but i was all kinds of excited to have a very noncommittal pen pal.

yes i was excited to have many different pen-pals from all over the world whom i would only ever have to write 4 lines or so to. truth is that i had a pen pal back in middle school. i believe i used the service advertised in the back of 17 magazine. she was a girl my same age from sweden. i chose sweden because i had spent most of the 7th grade studying sweden as a country of my ancestry and baking swedish pastries and trying to convince my mom that it would in fact be a bad idea to have me dress up as st. lucia and parade around the house wearing a crown of candles. now that i think of it maybe i should have gone for that so i could post the pictures and make my own daughter do that one day should i have one. i'm betting that would just thrill my mother to no end.

anyway, my pen pal and i exchanged letters for some time. then she had the great idea to exchange recorded tapes of us talking. that was fun and i felt cool when i would receive a package in the mail that was stamped from across the globe and i could play my tape for my girlfriends and say things like "inga is so cool. she really has blond hair, too!" i learned
about her life in sweden which didn't seem any different than mine really except that she always talked about going to the disco which mystified me. i get it now that i'm older and wiser.

but the commitment of full time pen-paling was too large for my 12 year old self. see, i would have to buy the blank tapes, and the mailers and then convince my mom to drive me the whole 4 miles to the post office and pay for airmail postage. and well, i was that kid that didn't really like to ask for stuff and going to post office required waiting in line and then i had to take time out from my busy schedule of reading 17 and taping singles off of the radio in order to create a totally riveting version of my life for my friend in sweden. so basically, i stopped writing to my pen pal and it fell off my radar until i read about this site. i wonder what ever happened to inga?

so i signed up right away and requested some addresses. i sent off my cards and in about 3 weeks i started to get cards of my own. i have received cards from japan, italy, taiwan, finland, new zeland and estonia (which i have to admit i didn't even know existed until the card arrived). this is a sampling of what i have received. i'm into the pictures on the cards and seeing what the postage looks like and trying to decipher the english is fun too. oh, and i get to take it one card at a time. very minimal commitment needed.