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Post by Deleted on Aug 8, 2009 10:56:55 GMT
Did any of you ever have a pen pal? I suppose this is a throwback to the 1950's,60's and nowadays with the internet one can converse with just about anyone on the other side of the earth with barely a forethought. The pen pal phenomena was quite popular when I was a young girl and seeing tilly's photo of the moon in Sweden this a.m. triggered this fond recall. I'm trying to remember how the process began,whether it was in school or through perhaps the Girl Scouts or church that one would acquire a name of someone in a foreign country and exchange letters. I was about 12 or 13 years old I remember. My pen pal was from Sweden and her name was Eva. We exchanged letters for quite some time and then for whatever reason ,we stopped. It was during that time though ,that I would anxiously await Eva's reply with great anticipation. The lightweight onion skin type air mail stationary, the exotic looking foreign stamp,the fountain pen inscribed letter full of girlish nonsense. We would talk about clothes,music and of course boys. At one point I remember we exchanged 45's,I sent her "She Loves You" by the Beatles,in English ,and she sent me same ,in Swedish. I remember putting the record on the phonograph and how bizarre it sounded to hear that song sung in Swedish. It was my first introduction to life in another country with someone my age as opposed to stories about the"old country" from my grandparents. Did any of you ever have a pen pal?
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Post by Deleted on Aug 8, 2009 11:27:27 GMT
I never had a penpal, but I knew a lot of people who did. I think I wasn't attracted because we already had the exotic thrill in the family of receiving foreign mail every week.
One thing that I do from time to time is send postcards to people or groups that request them ("Mrs. Martin's 5th grade class") -- I have no lack of extra postcards lying around and I can certainly afford the stamp. Sometimes it is really easy to make people happy.
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Post by imec on Aug 8, 2009 12:50:59 GMT
Never had one, but I do remember other kids having them - I think I was just to lazy to do all that writing. I also remember meeting girls in my travels or in theirs and agreeing to write but never following through. I recall at least two occasions when I'd get two or three really nice letters and he get a real nasty one about what an a$$hole I was not to respond. I've always felt bad about that.
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Post by livaco on Aug 8, 2009 13:06:12 GMT
When I was a kid we used to stay at a relative's cottage on the Mississippi River. And one day I wrote a note and put it in a bottle. It got maybe a mile or two downriver and was found by a family with a girl my age. We both lived in different parts of Wisconsin and became pen pals for a couple of years. It was something fun. I remember during that time always trying to get fun kinds of stationery and different colored pens and stuff. I don't remember any particular reason that we stopped writing to each other. I think it just sort of stopped when we got to be teenagers.
(I have actually one other time in my life put a letter in a bottle and got a response, although I wouldn't so much call it "penpals". It was a letter put in the ocean in England (Southend, I think?) and I got a response from someone in France a couple of years later.)
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Post by Deleted on Aug 8, 2009 13:46:00 GMT
The mother of one of my colleagues found a message in a bottle on her beach in Brittany. It was from a Canadian family, and she has been corresponding with them for more than ten years. She even took English classes so that she would not have to have her daughter constantly correct every word she wrote. The Canadian family has been extremely faithful, since they know that she is a lonely widow with not much to do. It's only right, because they after all were the ones who threw the bottle in the ocean.
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Post by Deleted on Aug 8, 2009 14:05:12 GMT
I've always wanted to send a message in a bottle. I think I might do that one of these days.
I had a few pen pals as a kid, one I got to meet in France (of all places), it was a bit of a disappointment..
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Post by Deleted on Aug 8, 2009 15:37:14 GMT
Getting a response to a message in a bottle! Has to be one of the coolest things imaginable. I have written umpteen messages in bottles,never got a response . My brother and I had a ritual we would perform after sharing a bottle of wine at the beach. We would write a poem,he one line ,I another, and so on,place it in a bottle and throw it out to sea.
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Post by traveler63 on Aug 9, 2009 22:04:37 GMT
I had a pen pal when I was young. Her name was Susan Temple and she lived in Boston, Massachusetts. We corresponded for a couple of years but then we both became teens and then my letters started coming back, so have no idea what happened.
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Post by livaco on Aug 9, 2009 22:28:01 GMT
casimira, I would love to find a bottle with a poem in it like what you and your brother did. I would respond to that. Now, it's just a question, because you had consumed a bottle of wine and all, did you actually include an address to receive a reply?
I don't what it is about me, but the only 2 times in my life I ever put out a message in a bottle I got a response...
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Post by livaco on Aug 9, 2009 22:33:49 GMT
I suppose the modern day equivalent of a pen pal for kids today would be an internet correspondence, which is probably more common than the paper version we had back in the day.
I know a few of my son's facebook and myspace friends are people who live in other countries who he has never actually met.
And there's this thing that we got here. :-) We are all "pen pals" in a way.
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Post by Deleted on Aug 9, 2009 22:35:55 GMT
Yeah, I think so too, livaco.
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Post by Deleted on Aug 9, 2009 23:06:40 GMT
Don't remember livaco ,if we included address,I like to think so. It was a very long time ago.
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Post by lola on Aug 9, 2009 23:38:42 GMT
I had a penpal named Graham who lived in Queensland, Australia. I was probably the less faithful of the two.
Casi, I would love to find one of those bottles. Unlikely given the tendency of water here to flow towards NOLA and away from the River des Peres
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Post by Deleted on Aug 10, 2009 23:38:04 GMT
These were thrown into the Atlantic Ocean circa 1976.
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Post by bjd on Aug 11, 2009 15:09:17 GMT
When I was in grade 6 or so, our teacher organized a penpal exchange with a class in Germany. The boy I wrote to was called Hans Gunther Weber and lived in Bonn, if I remember correctly. We wrote for several years. And my sister had a penpal in Japan although I don't remember how that came about. All I remember is that the girl sent my sister a Japanese record -- it was light green very flexible plastic.
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Post by Deleted on Aug 11, 2009 18:32:56 GMT
The bottle that my colleague's mother found was about two years old.
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Post by rikita on Aug 27, 2009 18:12:12 GMT
i had various. one was a girl i met on vacation, she lived a couple of hours north of where i lived. her grandmother lived in the village we always went to in the summer or fall, and we decided to become pen pals. well our families became friends too, and we visited each other sometimes.my dad is good friends with someone we know through her family now, but i lost contact with her for a long time, until she contacted me recently and we met up again.
also, i wrote to the address of a south african kids magazine that i knew from a magazine here, and got lots of responses. i had promised to answer all, but well i hadn't expected over 50 letters, so in the end i mainly answered those that seemed most interesting. i corresponded with some for a while, and from one girl i got another letter also a few years later after we had already lost touch, but well, in the end the contact all ended well before i started using the internet (otherwise i might have suggested to some of them to switch to email, it is just easier to keep in touch that way).
another pen pal was a girl from a west german town that had the same name of the village i went to school in - this was organized by school, shortly after the wall came down. we wrote for several years. apparently she once even was in my village, and looked up my house, but was too shy to ring the door bell. in the end we lost touch.
else... well i would say some email correspondences are like pen pals. like a mexican girl i know from a language exchange site and met when she came to germany, or an albanian girl i know from the same site and talk on messenger with, i would consider those pen pals too, in a way...
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Pen Pals
May 17, 2017 1:51:20 GMT
via mobile
Post by Kimby on May 17, 2017 1:51:20 GMT
"Blah, blah, blah" reminded me of my two penpals, both of whom I met in Europe in 1967, the summer before I entered 8th grade. Veronica "Vroni" was the granddaughter of the woman my widowed grandfather was dating. We were about the same age, and exchanged letters for several years. Lello was an Italian boy whose family was staying in the hotel room next to ours in Klagenfort (sp.?). My younger sisters and I were on our balcony and he and his brothers were on their balcony, so a fair amount of flirting and clowning around transpired. We exchanged addresses and corresponded until I went to college. His family owned a pool cue factory in Bari Italy (Rutigliani), and he sent me a packet of the decals they affixed to their cues. m.ebay.com/itm/172477877665?_mwBanner=1I'll bet I still have the bundles of letters from Vroni and Lello all these years later.
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Post by Deleted on May 17, 2017 3:56:57 GMT
When I was in 9th grade, I had a romanichel friend from Texas. His family had moved its trailer to our town for a season. We didn't have any classes together except study hall (not really a class of course), and I have no idea how we started talking, but we discovered a common passion for science fiction and quickly became best friends. His family moved on at the end of the school year, but we continued writing all through high school. Then I went to university and he went to... Vietnam. That's when we lost contact. Just recently I was remembering him and did an internet search. He wasn't on Facebook or anything, but he was on www.findagrave.com -- died in 1986 at age 35.
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Post by bixaorellana on May 17, 2017 4:26:35 GMT
That must have caused a pang!
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Post by questa on Feb 10, 2018 8:34:56 GMT
I met a couple of fantastic travellers when I did the St Petersberg-Beijing train trip, Ozzies now living in US but spend their time travelling all over the world in their super designed motor-home.From northern most place in Alaska to tip of South American continent.Journal and great photos. Website whiteacorn.com They are currently going from Vladivostok to Istanbul. Have been email friends since 2006
Then a New Zealand pair in their mid 70s. Trip was up north of Pakistan, over the highest mountain ranges and into China. She used to be mountain guide in NZ while he drove the London to Melbourne/return coach trips in the 1960s. Known as the "Kuta, Kathmandu, Kabul" route it posed all the adventures the hippies could hope for. When I was planning to go to Morocco I phoned him to see if he was interested in coming.It was good they did as the lady passed away a year later. I visited him in NZ a few years ago, still planning trips.
I still keep in touch with my room-mate from the Iran trip. She is from Tasmania and visits here occasionally Some of my travel friends have passed on now.They were all keen on finding the new countries and cultures and probably had a boarding pass tucked into a pocket in their coffin (like I want)
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