Spills and Spiels

from Germany

My mailbox has been feeling pretty lonely and empty for the past week that it was a joy to suddenly receive 3 postcards again, all at the same time!  I think our mailman doesn’t visit our place daily so I guess the post office hold up most of our mail for a number of days before actually delivering.

I’ll take a photo of our mailbox one of these days so you can see how hungry it looked.  I actually left a letter in the mailbox << one of ‘em advertisements about pre-school which we are not yet looking into.

The trouble with the post office here is that at least the only place I know that’ll take my letters and postcards is the one in District 1.  There’s no post office here in District 7!  I even called up directory assistance so they can direct me to one but I found out there’s none!  Such a hassle to go to District 1 every time I want to send a letter!  So now, the only way I can send is after I go to Sunday Mass or when I happen to be in District 1 for shopping or work.  I’m kinda excited going back to work actually coz it means I can drop by the P.O. during lunch time.  Postcrossing addict much?

Actually, not so much.  Haha.  Yeah right.  I can actually hear Manuel reminding me not to be OVERLY excited about sending postcards and scheduling our weekend trips to District 1 around getting to the post office.  This reminds me when we were in Malaysia and all I did was try to find a post office.  Unfortunately, all the signs in one mail office were in Malay that I couldn’t understand what to do and I was kinda embarrassed to ask around so I ended up sending the mail during the 2nd to the last day of our vacation in KL Sentral Market.

Out of the 7 postcards I’ll be sending this weekend, only 2 are “legitimately” for Postcrossing,  2 are personal mails and the other 3 are direct swaps of people I met through Postcrossing (Afghanistan, Lithuania, and Spain).  Isn’t that interesting?

What I love about this is suddenly, I’m getting in touch with my friends back home and abroad again — asking for their addresses.  When was the last time someone asked for your address to send you a letter?  I bet it has been a while, right?  And what’s cool about postcards is that if you run out of things to say, just tell something about the snapshot in the card and you’ll be alright.

Here’s 2 more of the postcards I received this week:

from Portugal

from Texas, USA

Postcards form Nam

I love collecting memorabilia from different places I visit or other people I know visited.  My number one favorite to collect are bookmarks (which I left in the Philippines).  That interest began when my ninang from the US sent me one of those gold metal type of bookmarks.  Since then, wherever I go I try to acquire more bookmarks that shows local color.

I tried collecting boomerangs from Australia and so far, I have two.  Not much luck there, eh?

So anyhoo, another favorite are postcards.  Lotsa, lotsa postcards.  I have postcards of cities and provinces I visited.  And luckily, I stumbled upon Postcrossing through a friend, Djong Tan in Facebook.  Now my postcards have somewhere to go!  I so love the idea of Postcrossing and the fact that you may get a REAL postcard in your mailbox sounds wonderful!

I have always lamented to my friend, Ging that we don’t get real mail anymore.  Now, I’m excited to go to the Post Office to send my postcards to people around the world (so far I’ve sent a couple to The Netherlands, Belarus, Czech Republic, UK, and the US).  I just joined Postcrossing last week and just yesterday, I found out that 2 people have already received the postcards I sent.  Hopefully, I’d get one in the mail soon too!

At least now, I wouldn’t only be getting billing statements in my mailbox!  Thank God for Postcrossing!