Postcards from Taiwan

I just got back from a trip to Taiwan! Of course the first thing I bought there was a big pile of postcards. These are cards in the Gotochi style, though they are from Taiwan and not Japan. They're thick and with unusual shapes all featuring local attractions or culture, done in a cartoon illustration style. I sent one to myself from Taipei on August 16, and it was waiting for me when I got my mail today! Hats off to you, Taiwan postal service. Also, holy cheap, Batman! Just about everything in Taiwan was reasonably priced or even inexpensive, coming from the USA, and the postage for this international postcard cost 11 NTD (New Taiwan Dollars). Guess how much that is in USD? As of this posting, 35 cents! Wow. I was able to send off a few postcards from Taipei, but it was mostly a work trip and I was busy most of the time, so I didn't get a whole lot of mail written or sent there. Also, mailboxes were a little hard to find in my area, so I carried a few postcards around for a number of days until I could finally mail them on Friday.

This Taiwan trip took up a lot of my mental energy this summer, preparing and planning for the trip (work trip - I did some guest teaching and gave a concert, so it was a lot more than just travel adventure!), and I guess I can offer that as an excuse for being so absent from this blog. We also spent the first couple months of the summer at our new house in Maine, which was idyllic but also busy. I did spend a lot of time actually *writing* mail instead of blogging about it, but we also did a lot of work on the house and I spent a ton of time in the gardens.



YES! I have gardens again! I'm super excited about that, though it's challenging to be away from them for weeks or months at a time. The summer days flew by, as I spent hours in the garden with my hands in the dirt.

So right now I'm in a bit of location limbo... a week in Maine, a few days in NH, a week in Taiwan, a few days in NH, nearly a week in Maine, a few days in NH, a weekend in Maine... you get the picture. (Because I'm so back-and-forth, my etsy store will remain closed for a couple more weeks.) And then summer is over and I'm back to school crazy-ness. I've had all kinds of postal adventures in addition to travel adventures, and I'll try to catch up and get them blogged as best I can, but in the meantime... I hope everyone is having a fantastic, mail-filled summer!

Postcards from Amsterdam

This year for Thanksgiving we went to Amsterdam. I think it is our favorite city in the world. I won't go into why here, but suffice to say we had a fantastic time. Of course I sent postcards, and had an awfully fine time writing them in various wonderful Dutch bars. Pictured above and below is my favorite bar, a haunt right down the street from where we stayed (and we went there every single night!), Gollem Proeflokaal.



Here I spent some fine time writing, drinking, talking, listening to music, and communing with the fantastic bar cats. And thanks to the amazing bartender who fixed us up with two transcendant beer flights, I discovered my new love: Karmeliet Tripel beer. (For those of you that know about my gluten sensitivities: I am not celiac but don't consume any gluten in the USA, it causes me all kinds of problems. For reasons I don't understand - different farming practices? GMO rules? - I can have gluten in the Netherlands. Beer, bread, none of it bothers me over there. So I drank a hell of a lot of fantastic beer!)



Another bar where I wrote postcards, Parck, was an "American style" bar, but I didn't even know that until I looked up their website just now!



The bar cat here was friendlier - I was about the only person in the place at this time - and she came up and was very interested in my postcard writing. She helped, for sure.



I forgot to get my picture taken when I mailed postcards from other mailboxes, but the very last batch went out at the airport, and I remembered to ask for a photo then. I had no idea I was matching my Letter Writers Alliance bag so well, with my blue sweater and red earwarmers. Incidentally, the LWA member bag (sorry, it really is for members only - but if you're reading this blog, why aren't you a member of the Letter Writers Alliance?!?) is my new favorite travel bag. I have carried it on trains, planes, in cars, and it's been all over the world now. It's a darn fine bag.

So that was my trip, my postcard fun, and why I've been a little absent lately. Now I'm home, in my very busy season at work, but I'll have a brief respite the second half of December so I do hope to have some more blog posts coming. November has not been a good month for blogging or for mail, but it's been a fine month for travel and adventure!

Edward Gorey House visit: Part 3

As previously mentioned, Gorey was a cat lover, and apparently his feline companions had run of the house to do as they pleased. I find it utterly charming that the House Museum included this placard near the original couch. "The dramatic and creative result of many years of many cats is the couch you see before you..."



Yep, that's what the kitties can do.



Gorey wrote The Gashleycrumb Tinies, one of his most famous books, in 1963. It is an abecedarian book featuring the death of a child for every letter of the alphabet. It's delightfully morbid. My current 2012 calendar, above my writing desk, is from the Gashleycrumb Tinies. This month I see "Q is for Quentin who sank on a mire. R is for Rhoda consumed by a fire," complete with the accompanying drawings. Behind the house is a "graveyard" for the Gashleycrumb Tinies... here we see O is for Olive run through with an awl. (Here's more about the gravestones, if you're interested.)



Here I am posing with the garden sculpture of The Doubtful Guest. What an honor!



Naturally, I had to get a little silly and try a sort-of imitation. It kind of looks like he's sniffing my head or sucking my brains out, no?



After our visit, we headed over to The Optimist Cafe for lunch - just a few blocks down the road, and a delightful lunch. They had a whole tea menu, so I indulged in a pot. It was an indulgent day, an utter delight. I hope you've enjoyed my excessive posts about the visit (and good gravy, I think this is more photos of my own self than I've ever posted, oy!) and, as I said before, I encourage anyone in the area to make time for a visit. The Gorey House is open seasonally, April through December.

The Edward Gorey House visit: Part 1

The Edward Gorey House visit: Part 2

If you want to see the whole slew of photos of my visit (with commentary), hop on over to my full Edward Gorey House photo set on Flickr.

And don't forget to check out the Edward Gorey House website, too!

Edward Gorey House visit: Part 2

Edward Gorey's kitchen was filled with character. Here we see his fireplace mantle. Note the cat food bowls on the hearth, and the cat on the mantle. Cat imagery was EVERYWHERE (Gorey adored cats and always had "about 5 or 6 at a time"), but alas, the latest Gorey House live cat had just passed away two weeks before my visit. (That cat was not one of Gorey's, but an adoptee and fixture in the house.)

Gorey often made his own puppets, usually stuffed with rice. The framed puppet on the mantle is Figbash, a character created for his book "The Raging Tide." I believe this is the first, original Figbash doll, but I could be wrong... I was in another room when the tour guide explained that, and I was only half-listening.

There's also a nice fat cat on the mantle, and a couple of dogs, and of course an axe... reference to his Gashleycrumb Tinies book? "K is for Kate who was struck with an axe." Now, can you guess my favorite thing about the mantle? Look at the braces holding it up. They're carved bats!!



The last waffle of the millennium? And it's a dancing girl? I missed the story of this in the tour. I guess I was wandering at that stage. This is one bit I wish I'd heard more about. Wow. I do know it's from the restaurant where Gorey ate two meals a day, nearly every day... you can also see the framed waffle itself.



Speaking of that restaurant... here's a month of receipts from it. It's fascinating to see what he ate. He ate at this place twice a day nearly every day, and it was a quirky local place where diners filled out their own order slips, bussed their own tables, and had their own mugs hanging on hooks in the place. So these were his orders, in his own handwriting. I saw a lot of eggs and tuna melts.



If you're a Gorey fan, you probably know that he drew/animated the intro theme for the PBS show "Mystery!" I remember seeing that in my early childhood, and being utterly enchanted... perhaps that's one of the early seeds of my Gorey obsessions. The back room was filled with Mystery memorabilia, and there is a TV in the corner that loops the intro constantly. I don't recall if this reading man with cat figured into the Mystery intro, but I love the artwork.



Sorry this photo is a touch blurry, but I just had to throw it on the blog for its Gorey charm. This kid-sized table and chairs, with a bunch of Gorey stamps and crayons and paper, is in a corner of the Mystery room. I asked about the stamps in the gift shop, but alas - they're discontinued and the store had none to sell! In typical Gorey style, even though this looks like a kids area, there is a delightfully disturbing quote from The Doubtful Guest posted on the wall above the characters (from that scene of The Doubtful Guest) that reads:

"It joined them at breakfast and presently ate
All the syrup and toast, and a part of a plate."

Thus concludes Part 2. Stay tuned for Part 3, where you'll see photos of Gorey's cat-scratched couch, and photos of me posing with The Doubtful Guest (tee hee).

Edward Gorey House visit: Part 1

Here begins my official, extensive chronicle of my fantastic visit to The Edward Gorey House yesterday. I have so many photos to share with you that I think I'll need to break it up into multiple posts. If you want to see the whole slew of photos, though, hop on over to my full Edward Gorey House photo set on Flickr.

So above, you see me posing with the fantastic, dapper front door cat. This is the actual front door of 8 Strawberry Lane, but now you enter and exit the house/museum through the side door (aka gift shop).

The current exhibit is what got me off my duff to finally visit the Gorey House: Edward Gorey's Envelope Art!!



Most unfortunately, the Gorey House allows non-flash photography everywhere BUT the current featured exhibit. So, alas, the items I most wanted to photograph were strictly forbidden. Words do not describe the utter amazingness of the envelopes on display - originals, in Gorey's own hand, through the mail with their old stamps and postmarks and all - so if you are at all able to make it to the museum to see them, I cannot recommend it highly enough. (It runs through December 2012.) Many of the envelopes were featured in the recent book, Floating Worlds: The Letters of Edward Gorey & Peter F. Neumeyer, and I hear that book is wonderful. I'd like to get it. But quite a few of the envelopes were to many different people (including delightful ones to Gorey's mother), and I don't know if those feature in the book or not. I somehow think not. Anyway, the image above, a reproduction on a sign outside, was the only "envelope" I got to photograph. Some cool things were in the special display room, too, and photos weren't allowed anywhere in there. So I couldn't take photos of photos of Gorey snuggling with his own cats, or his original "I love cats" artwork, complete with cat, or of the typewriter by that mantle. But oh well. All the more reason to entice you to the museum yourself.



It's a 90-minute drive to the Gorey House from my own, so of course one of the first things I needed to do upon arrival was visit the loo. Even the humble potty room was enlivened with Gorey character, including bats on the mirror. (Swoon.)

I escaped the tour to do so; we got there right at opening, and jumped into a very large tour that had just begun. Full disclosure: I did not care for the tour and only shadowed it. My best beloved and I struck out on our own, reading placards and exploring at our own pace. I heard bits from the tour, but not only was I put off by the size of the tour - the rooms were small, and not everyone in the tour group could even fit inside the room being toured - but I was not enamored of the tour guide. You know how it is. Sometimes you just don't click with 'em. Nothing personal.



Epistolary Play!! I confess I'd never even heard of this, but how I would have loved to have seen it! I was bummed that the gift shop didn't have any of the postcards, but oh well. How awesome is the tree of pen nibs?? In my Edward Gorey House Flickr photo set, there's also another great photo in this vein of a bouquet of pen nibs for Epistolary Play.



In the area that used to be the main front staircase of the house, there is now a display of Gorey's fantastic involvement in the 1977 Broadway staging of Bram Stoker's Dracula. Gorey designed both the costumes and the sets. He was nominated for Tony awards for both, and won the Tony for Best Costume Design. I somehow managed NOT to get a good photo of the Tony itself.

Because this is so extensive and photo-heavy, I'm going to break this up into multiple parts. Ready for more? Voila - Edward Gorey House visit: Part 2!

Today I went to the Edward Gorey House!

Today was a VERY exciting day in my little Missive Maven world: I finally visited The Edward Gorey House! I took a little field trip to Cape Cod, Massachusetts - Yarmouth Port, to be precise - with my best beloved, and we spent a lovely time exploring the house and grounds, followed by a fabulous lunch at a cute teahouse nearby. I took 80 photos and absorbed ever so much about one of my all-time favorite artists. It did not disappoint - we loved the house so much that we decided we have to go back as soon as they have another exhibition. (I believe they change a few times every year.)

Proof: I was really there!

I took a whopping 80 photos, and I will soon be sorting through them and writing a FULL post all about this lovely visit. But I was so excited about the adventure that I just had to share it with my dear readers right away.

I cannot believe the days have flown by. How have I not posted since August 11?? I apologize for neglecting the blog, and if truth be told, neglecting my mail somewhat. My life has been filled with ups and downs the past few months - family drama and health issues combined with wonderful trips and joys like this - but at least I can say I have been living it to the fullest. Summer rhythms are about to cycle into the fall season, and that always brings changes... but I am still here, and very excited to share not only more Edward Gorey House photos with you (hopefully tomorrow), but MAIL-RELATED Edward Gorey House photos!

For now, though, it's time to go write a letter.

Giant pink snails in Miami Beach

I recognize the connection to snail mail may be tenuous, but hey - it's a giant snail! How could I not share this weird phenomenon with my blog readers?



Check out pinksnails.com to learn more about the giant hot pink snails that have flooded Miami Beach, Florida for a few weeks this winter. I was in Miami Beach for a few days, and it was enormous fun to see them sprinkled all over the place in various parks and such. Also, it was great fun to see other people climbing them - and to climb them myself!



It's a bummer to be away from my mailbox due to holiday travels, but among all the destinations to keep me away, Miami Beach was pretty darn awesome.