Snailmail

I signed up in an international portal since I was at high school. I was a quiet one, not much talk especially with stranger. But since that day, I feel myself get easier to talk to strangers. In that portal, there are several options why you join there, including 'flirting', that is shown on the optional boxes. And I found something interesting, snailmail. I never heard about this before, but I thought it is like a mail that goes slower because snail always walking so slow. Then someone chatted me and told me that she want to snailmail. I asked her what is that and she said 'it is postcard swapping'.

 was taken at Museum Angkut years ago. taken using my old unique phone

Wow.. postcard swapping.. my granny and I did it long time ago before mobile phone was invented. Well I mean before we all use mobile phone to connect to each other. I have family in The Netherlands, and we only have a phone, if we call them using home phone it would cost a lot for even few minutes. So expensive to call for 5 minutes by phone. Then the only way to keep in touch with family in NL without worrying to pay a lot is writing a letter.

We swap letter periodically. Well.. I couldn't say that we always do it once a month because we never know when our letter reach our family. Sometimes it needs 2 weeks, sometimes a month, even 3 months. So we have to be patient to wait for the next post man come to our home and bring a letter.

That was so cute. I mean when we want to tell them about how our daily life goes, it would be so interesting. But for urgent matters like death, or one of our family is dying then we have to call them directly by phone.

 two of my besties

That was years ago when I was in elementary school.

Technology is growing day by day and we start to leave the old ways to say hello. We start to using SMS by mobile phone years ago, we still writing letter but send it through email with one click to send and one click to read, and nowadays we are using Whatsapp. Although we still swapping for the cards for Christmas and Ied Fitri, only for that occasions.

Last time I got a letter from family in NL, it was when the old brother of my grandma is died. The letter arrive a month after the day of his death. Gladly one of family from Jakarta call and tell us about this bad news. So we knew it before the letter arrived.  

I start to miss  this thing. Swapping letter. Until a friend of mine far away asking me to swap a letter. I couldn't really remember from where, but I got a lot letters from Japan, Russia, Germany, America, Africa etc. It is giving me a pleasure to feel something old and unique again.

 only two letters in frame

We often swap something like postcards, pictures, even money (unused old and unique currency). Small things that I have inside the small envelop is something nice. It will take time of course to get the letter but still I love to wait it. I don't know maybe I am just a weirdo but I like something about old days. Something that make you feel come back to years ago, to feel the euphoria that day where that thing were famous that day.

So, I enjoy it, to swap the letters. I didn't do it this whole year although I still got the letters. But didn't reply them yet. I miss to do it again. Maybe I will use this weekend to write them back all.