Deleted
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Post by Deleted on Feb 5, 2021 8:48:43 GMT
I'm curious. The focus is on "regular", so occasional letters or postcards to family members or friends don't count.
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Post by Mia on Feb 5, 2021 12:15:00 GMT
I think early teenage years, as my school had an exchange programme with a Gymnasium school in Deutschland.... vielen Dank für Deinen Brief ... is ingrained in the memory (pity about the rest of the vocab I learnt...). I might have written to a primary school friend who moved away (different country), but I don't remember writing (I do have her letter though).
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Post by ginny on Feb 5, 2021 13:33:31 GMT
I was 13, and we met via a penpal ad in a magazine (that was way before the internet). That person lives in Germany, and we still are in touch (40+ years later). I had a one letter stint with someone from England when I was 12 (via IYS), but that didn't last, so I don't count that.
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sareini
Crayons
Posts: 8
Looking for Penpals?: Yes. Global penpals welcome
Country I live in is: UK
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Post by sareini on Feb 5, 2021 15:57:44 GMT
When I first went to university one of my best friends from back home and I wrote frequent letters to each other for about two years, phone calls being too expensive for poor students and neither of us having regular internet access at the time. Plus we both enjoyed writing the letters.
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Post by InsomniaQueen on Feb 5, 2021 16:58:07 GMT
We had an international pen pal project at school. I don't remember if it was part of a specific class or if it was a homeroom thing that everyone did. I believe I was 13 or 14. I exchanged letters with a girl in Germany and a girl in Australia. I still have the letters somewhere around here.
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Post by distractedmom on Feb 6, 2021 17:01:22 GMT
When I was 12, I moved from Michigan to Ohio. When I was 14, I moved from Ohio to Illinois.
I had one friend in MI whom I regularly wrote to, and one from Ohio. Once we got to college and email became a thing, we exchanged emails instead. Now with families and social media and free long-distance phone calls, there are no more paper letters.
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Post by summer87 on Feb 7, 2021 6:06:31 GMT
I gave my address in a local children's magazines penpal section (13 yr old then). I started receiving letters from Philippines, Indonesia, Latvia, US etc. Somebody took my address and put it up in other magazines. Lol. I wouldn't call it regular, I stopped writing after awhile because the international postage charges were exorbitant.
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Post by radellaf on Feb 7, 2021 7:05:11 GMT
I was into stationery from before I can remember, and into fountain pens from the mid 1990s (on and off depending on budget). I don't think I started penpalling until picking up 4 or 5 off a pen friends thread on FPN, probably in 2011. Then more from InCoWriMos starting in 2013, which I think I heard about from the sadly short-lived FP Geeks podcast. Or the Anderson Pens one, which I haven't been listening to much in past years as it has seemed less conversational and more "what new pens did Sailor release" this month. Maybe I'm being unfair. I bailed on Penaddict after they became "the field notes podcast," but that phase is now long over.
As a kid I think my need to use my pens was taken care of by school. Certainly in college it was. Not exactly sure what I was doing from 2000-2010 or so (in any number of ways).
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Deleted
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Post by Deleted on Feb 7, 2021 12:58:31 GMT
the international postage charges were exorbitant. I also remember that - as a teenager back in the 1980s - I spent a fortune of my pocket money for stamps. Overseas letters were SO expensive depending on the weight. At the time I always used that very light - and very ugly! - light blue air mail stationery in order to not exceed 10 g (or roughly 0,35 oz). I loved the air mail envelopes though. Anyone of you still remember that?
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Post by eefa on Feb 7, 2021 17:37:58 GMT
I was 12 when I had my first regular pen pal but really it was a case of my "best friend" at the time moving to a different county and as this was the 1980s (pre smart phones/email etc) we wrote to each other. Other than that my first regular penpals, i.e. not just friends who had moved away, was in 2019 when I did InCoWriMo for the first time.
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Post by stompie on Feb 7, 2021 18:01:39 GMT
Oh yes! Up to a few years ago our local post office still stocked those airmail/letter envelope things and I might still have some tucked away somewhere. When I get time I must sort through my stationery supplies!
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Post by allanorn on Feb 7, 2021 20:39:11 GMT
the international postage charges were exorbitant. I also remember that - as a teenager back in the 1980s - I spent a fortune of my pocket money for stamps. Overseas letters were SO expensive depending on the weight. At the time I always used that very light - and very ugly! - light blue air mail stationery in order to not exceed 10 g (or roughly 0,35 oz). I loved the air mail envelopes though. Anyone of you still remember that? I have hundreds of aerogrammes that I intend to use for a letter writing project, if I only had the time.
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Post by ginny on Feb 7, 2021 21:43:42 GMT
the international postage charges were exorbitant. I also remember that - as a teenager back in the 1980s - I spent a fortune of my pocket money for stamps. Overseas letters were SO expensive depending on the weight. At the time I always used that very light - and very ugly! - light blue air mail stationery in order to not exceed 10 g (or roughly 0,35 oz). I loved the air mail envelopes though. Anyone of you still remember that? I bought airmail envelopes recently, so they still exist. I don't think the airmail stationery you mentioned is still available, though. ELCO produced airmail stationery in pink and green, too, and I always tried to purchase that as it was a bit more fancy than the light blue paper...
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Post by radellaf on Feb 7, 2021 22:02:01 GMT
I used those back in 1996 or so when a friend of mine was in the Peace Corps in Nepal. A combination of those and these little boxes just the right size for audio cassettes. A 2 AA walkman was barely maintainable tech in Nepal. A mouse got the headphones, once, but otherwise it lasted the full two years. Writing tiny on the aerogrammes was fun, though. Not entirely sure why I didn't just send letters. Not like the postage woulda killed me. Probably less than a buck in '96 (90¢ according to this)
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Post by tramplingrose on Feb 7, 2021 23:56:24 GMT
I also remember that - as a teenager back in the 1980s - I spent a fortune of my pocket money for stamps. Overseas letters were SO expensive depending on the weight. At the time I always used that very light - and very ugly! - light blue air mail stationery in order to not exceed 10 g (or roughly 0,35 oz). I loved the air mail envelopes though. Anyone of you still remember that? I bought airmail envelopes recently, so they still exist. I don't think the airmail stationery you mentioned is still available, though. ELCO produced airmail stationery in pink and green, too, and I always tried to purchase that as it was a bit more fancy than the light blue paper... My first real penpal came from kindergarten - We’d had an exchange student from Sweden, Jesper Johanssen, and he was my best friend. We exchanged a couple letters (mostly written by our moms) before losing touch in first grade. I didn’t really have another until I was about 13. I don’t remember exactly how we came into contact, but I ended up regularly corresponding with a girl in Finland, who’s my longest-corresponding penpal. We’d sort of lost contact after college, reconnected on social media years ago, and about 6 months ago, rekindled our writing correspondence thanks to COVID shutting down so much. I used aerogrammes throughout high school and college - my college roommate spent a semester studying in Italy, so I used them to write her. I have a stack of them I’m sitting on that I don’t really know what to do with. If anyone’s interested, though, Pineider (Italian stationery) still makes the lightweight light blue airmail stationery - I bought myself a box a couple years ago as a Christmas present. I believe you can get it in A4 (my personal preference) and A5 sizes.
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