My dad travelled a lot for work when I was younger, so he started a
tradition: Every time he visited a new city, he would send my three
sisters and me a postcard. Four individualized postcards from all over
the world would end up on massive bulletin boards that hung on the walls
of my childhood home. He would end each card with a trivia question
about the city he was in, which became my earliest form of geography and
culture studies.
Remembering the joy I felt
every time a new postcard arrived in the mail, I decided sometime early
in high school to introduce that tradition to my friends. To this day, I
keep a note in my phone with all my friends' home addresses, and the
first thing I do when I visit a new country is find the nearest tourist
trap and load up on postcards. During downtime (which is hard to come by
on Strasburger family trips) I get to work, always starting with a
greeting written in the local language (I've since mastered writing
"hello" in Arabic, Hindi, and hieroglyphs [dusts off shoulders]) and ending with a trivia question of my own.
I
recently realized that writing postcards serves two purposes. The first
is that it's a good excuse to take a moment during an otherwise hectic
trip to reflect on the experience I'm having. I'm essentially writing a
mini diary entry about what I've seen and how it's made me feel.
And
since I always send a postcard home to my roommate, I'll later catch a
glimpse of one taped above her desk on a boring Tuesday in the middle of
winter and immediately get transported back to the exciting sights and
smells of summer in Kazakhstan.
Secondly,
it's a sneaky way to insert yourself into your friends' homes. I love
going into a kitchen to grab a beer at a party and seeing my terrible
handwriting sprawled across the host's fridge. I get an egomaniacal rush
realizing that they must see it and think of me every time they go in
for a sandwich or a midnight snack. I aim to be whatever the opposite of
"out of sight, out of mind" is.
So next time you're heading to a new place, budget in some time and money for writing postcards and buying stamps, and let the surprised and delighted texts from friends start flowing in approximately one month after your back from the trip. Hey—it's called snail mail for a reason.
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