Monday, June 28, 2010

Postcards



Hey friends!

As you can see I'm not in the south anymore... Goodbye sirens and hello Rhine maidens... Last night was the Germany vs. UK match. The horns blasting the whole night long! Thinking of you...

xo

bb

* * *


I'm guessing that all of us are old enough to remember postcards. It was a wonderful ritual of travel. You would browse around for something typical, or beautiful, or funny, or ironic (or all of the above). You would find a nice cafe table and scribble away. Then you would wander around looking for the right postage. First you would look for a post office. But then you would recall that tobacconists sold postage as well. And you would then apply postage, and in the final stage hunt around for a postbox.

And of course there was the other side of the ritual. Getting them in the mail! Sometimes a relative (parents - wish you where here!), a friend, or occasionally someone or the other who you had a crush on (or even who had a crush on you). Back in the days before Facebook and e-mail and Skype, that was all we had to engage in long-distance flirtation. Of course if the flirtation got serious you could also take it up to the next level. And back in the day that meant a letter (not wink-wink texting as it might mean these days).

I'm not judging or ranking. Today's methods have their own thrills. But the older style did too.

xo

bb

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

I have always been a lousy postcard writer, I always left the postcard-writing chore until the last day of vacation because I could never think of something nice to write. But I was always thrilled when I received postcards from those friends who always seemed to write clever or funny things. Less so when I got postcards saying "tanti cari saluti" full stop, which was the majority of them. So no, not too much nostalgia here, but I'm sure you wrote brilliant postcards!
xxx
Mia

Unknown said...

ah yes...when "snails" roamed wild...we were so much more romantic! :)

RD said...

Mia -- It's true. There was a certain obligation as well, and they could be half-hearted... but...

If Jane -- indeed. something romantic about it since they were little transmissions from out of the blue...

bb

Anonymous said...

As a teenager I used to keep all the postcards I received, they are still somewhere I think. I remember that at the end of the summer I used to count them to see if all my friends had actually remembered me, how insecure can one get!

Mia's sister

RD said...

I used to do that to! At some point I used to put them up on a board. Trophies of the summer! xo bb

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