Cat drawings from Germany

One of my pen pals from the German pen pal site Letternet is also a cat lover, and an excellent artist! I love the perspective of the cat whimsically batting from above.



Another cat said goodbye at the closing. The use of white on the brown paper is really cool, I think, and I was thoroughly charmed by her feline artwork on this letter.



It even had a cat to hold my address on the envelope! Note the cat is holding down the Luftpost sticker... good move, as we all know air mail is prone to flying away.

Speaking of flying away... I've removed my sent statistics. They served their purpose as an interesting experiment and examination, but I feel they've taken the focus away from the letters themselves. It doesn't matter how many letters we write, just that we are writing them... don't you think?

A little more on Letternet

I have posted a few times before about Letternet, Deutsche Post's (Germany's postal service) pen pal website. (See Deutsche Post's Letternet, Letternet Update, and More on the Letternet Saga for past commentary.) I just wanted to share with my readers that I have received many, many fun letters from Germany this way. For all the details about it, please read my previous posts linked above and visit the Letternet website (I think I linked the English version there), but I can heartily say that you are pretty likely to get quite a few pen pals from this service if you are patient. People in Germany can request pen pals from anywhere, but anyone from other countries can only be matched with writers in Germany. This makes sense, being sponsored by the German postal service - what's in it for them if they link me, in the USA, up with someone in France? Anyway, I've only written first to one or two people, and I have approved countless other address requests from other people, and I admit I haven't kept an exact count, but I think I've probably received Letternet letters from at least 15 people by now. So I give Letternet my full endorsement for anyone who's looking for a way to find a pen pal in Germany. Incidentally, a few of the letter-writers had some degree of trouble with English, but most of them wrote in English most impressively. (Don't ask me to write in German!)

I'd love to hear feedback from anyone else who's tried Letternet - so far I've only heard positive things.

More on the Letternet saga

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!

Letternet update

If you recall my original blog entry about Deutsche Post Letternet, I promised to keep you updated about the arrival of my address code.

I initially joined up and requested an address code on Sunday, February 14 - and today I received that address code from Germany via snail mail - or rather, via Luftpost. The letter is dated February 16, and though it doesn't have a postmark date (go figure), that still seems right speedy to have arrived in less than a week.

So I entered by address code and am now a "full member." The searching for pen pals system seems pretty darn random and you don't have a lot of search options (nor can you write your own profile, it seems), but I've requested at least one address so far, just for the heck of testing it out, and we'll see what happens.

UPDATE 23 Feb 2010: Thanks to a very helpful comment from tanuki below, I discovered a little more about the methods. No, you don't get notification when someone approves an address request - they just show up in your pen pals list. So I logged in just now, and found that someone had requested my address! I approved it, but now I just see a very minimal profile and an address for her. Does she write first, since she requested? Or do I? There is really no way to message each other or communicate about that. Maybe I'll send her a postcard.

Deutsche Post Letternet

Through the Penpalling and Letters blog which I just discovered recently, I learned of Deutsche Post's Letternet. (Deutsche Post is Germany's postal service.) I've linked the English version of the site, but the original language is, of course, German. It appears to be a pen pal service - free - for anyone in the world. Goodness knows I don't need any more pen pals, but I did sign up out of curiosity. I found it a little unsettling that I had to agree to Terms of Service that are available only in German, so I couldn't really read them, but oh well.

Letternet, which calls itself the "largest pen pal club in the world," has a weird questionnaire that involves asking questions with picture associations: four pictures for "this is what friendship feels like," "this is what stress feels like," etc. It seems geared to younger people, but of course I am supportive of any endeavor to encourage good clean letter-writing. The site is in beta form, and I suspect some things may be clearer in German than in the English translation. For example, my address is listed in my profile as "not confirmed." To confirm it, I need a confirmation code. How do I get this code? I don't know. I couldn't figure that out. I used the contact form to ask, but haven't heard back. From the post about it on the Penpalling and Letters blog, I think I might need to wait for a snail-mail envelope or package from them - fine and dandy, that seems a lovely way to confirm my address, although it would be nice to learn that from the Letternet site itself.

EDIT: Actually, I poked around a little further, and in fact the info is on the site, on the How you can participate page. There it says: "As soon as you have created your profile we check your address so that you can make pen-friends. We shall send you a letter containing your personal registration code, which you need to enter in "My Data/Confirm your Adress". You are then a full member and can search for pen-friends all over the world." OK. All good. I'll wait for the letter in the mail.]

Also, when I entered my mailing address as part of the registration process, the required fields were pretty specific to a German address format (makes sense, after all - it IS a German service), and I had to enter my own address in a weird way - I hope their fields will align with the US mail fields such that mail will reach me successfully. I'll find out, I suppose, and I'll keep you posted, but anyone who is brave that wants to try it out, go for it... the site seems very legit and is clearly part of the Deutsche Post larger website system.

I have a few German pen pals, and my experience with Deutsche Post overall is that the service is fast and reliable, and the stamps are really cool... so I joined up without hearing other reports first.

If anyone else out there who reads this blog has used or is using Letternet, I'd love to hear about your experience with it.

On another note, Happy Valentine's Day! I might do a V-Day posting later, and I might not. Truth be told, it's not a very big deal to me, but I didn't feel like I could make a post on February 14 without mentioning it.