Penpals

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I have penpals as a hobby, snail mail, and have been doing this for years. It is a great way for me to "make friends". Just wondering if anyone else does this or would be interested. I have always been interested in geography.

<----- Had a Japanese penpal in HS. Kuniyo Aota was her name.

Welcome to WP from a fellow geography fan.

You can be my penpal if you want.

I used to do this when I was young, it was great to get a letter in the mail. It's not at all the same thing as getting an email.

I don't think I'd be able to do it today, I am a casualty of this culture of instant gratification and I would find it hard to go through all the trouble of getting stamps and envelopes and writing and then having to wait so long for a reply. Plus I've become paranoid about giving my home address out to unknown persons.

I did a spot of penpalling while I was in high school and university, i.e. before the Internet came to be in commonplace public use. It was of course common to make penpals through penpal organisations which worked in school, school exchanges/trips and holidays. Through all of these channels I've had penpals. In fact, even after I got online one or two e-mail correspondences moved to snail mail.

Unfortunately I could see that time and time again, for people to have a penpal correspondence with me did not work out. I attribute this to my odd behaviour which would have come across as odder in the past before I tried to "modify" myself, and restricted interests. I'm sure this would come across even when I was writing letters in a foreign language. And I'm also sure people would get some sort of snapshot of my life from my letters and feel that things were not quite the norm.

I make allowances that maybe letters get lost in the post occasionally, but surely not with most penpals. Surely most of the time they simply stopped corresponding. For example after I'd been on one trip abroad to a school we were twinned with, where pupils from both schools were assigned to each other and you stayed at their home, penpal correspondences naturally occurred. However when I wrote a letter to this pupil, instead of getting a reply from him I got one from his mother, to explain that he didn't wish to correspond. And on a return visit to our school, with the same pairs assigned, he (alone out of his class) did not come over.

I had a boy penpal from England and he came to meet me last summer. I really thought it was to start a romantic connection.
I am not sure, but he's either going to be gay or one of the single forever types. He's really religious which is fine... but he came nowhere near me.
Thankfully, he was "cheap", "dirty" and "rude". So the problem wasn't me, it was him, as far as I am concerned and now we don't write anymore. We wrote for years.

Doesn't sound like it was a positive experience. At least it wasn't you who had the expense of going all the way to England only to find out how cheap, dirty, rude and 'forever alone' your penpal was. I'm sure you take that as a positive.

Apart from the guy above I met another one I'd penpalled with, although it originally started on e-mail. He must have had a similar negative experience because correspondence stopped after we met. I guess meeting snail mail penpals is every bit like meeting people from online, with its risk factor. As he was spending 6 months working in England at the time, at least he didn't have the waste of expense of coming over from his country. Same country as the other guy, but the country shall remain nameless.

Keeno, and that country that shall remain nameless, seem to be chalk and cheese.

I had a pen pal from Manchester England that I met through La Leche League's pen pal program. We both had babies the same age. We talked for years in mail and on the phone, sent packages etc. We lost touch and I wonder what happened to her. I wish I knew how to find her, I still remember her name and address, but I'm sure they moved. That was 17 years ago.

I also used to have pen pals through something called "The Letter Exchange". It was a little magazine you subscribed to and it listed people and addresses and their interests. You picked people to write to based on common interests. It was great. I do miss that.

I just Googled The Letter Exchange and here is the website if anyone is interested.

The Letter Exchange

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I'm giving it another shot. We will see.
My forum is still there and everyone is welcome to come join as well. There is a private women only subforum there if anyone is interested. Also, there is no CAPTCHA.

The link to the forum is http://www.rightplanet.proboards.com