I don't have any fancy photos at the moment, but I just wanted to update my faithful readers on the continuing Letternet saga. In my original post, I mentioned the penpal service of the German postal service (Deutsche Post) called Letternet. You can read my previous posts - oh-so-handily linked right here for your convenience - to catch up on the saga, but I do have a couple of recent developments.
So far I've received two letters from Letternet. I wrote one letter to the only pen pal I requested who approved my address request, and she wrote back very swiftly. Her English is probably the worst I've seen from a German... don't get me wrong, her English is a hell of a lot better than my German, but maybe she just wants practice. In any case her letter was very sincere and I shall definitely write her back, though there may be a bit of a language barrier. The second letter arrived today (postmarked March 4 - yay Deutsche Post/US Postal service for 4-day delivery from Germany!), from a fine gal who writes much better English. She requested my address and I approved that request, and she must have written me really soon after that, and she included a photo of herself. I confess that I cannot really explain why, but I get a little skeezed out when people send pictures in the first letter (well, okay, I did get a couple of really creepy photos like that from The Letter Exchange, but we'll write those off as the inevitable weirdos), but maybe including photos is more of a European cultural thing to do... I mean, I know what a lot of my pen pals look like because they have blogs and they post photos of themselves there. Anyhoo, this German gal's photo was not skeezy at all, just a nice-looking German lady about my age, standing by a pretty mountain with her cute dog. Totally a lovely letter, descriptive and warm. I will definitely write her back and enjoy doing so.
So - for anyone interested in finding pen pals from Germany, I do recommend Letternet. It has its limitations - you cannot write anything in a personal profile, can't list a blog, can't add a photo, and if you're in the USA, you can only search for people in Germany (clearly Germans can search for folks in the USA, though, because at least one ended up with me), but since I've gotten two nice letters from there already in 3 weeks of membership, I'd say that's a pretty good track record. Quite a few other folks have requested my address, too, and I've approved those, but at this point I'm just waiting to see if they'll write first, since they were the ones who made the request.
Happy writing, folks!
