Netherlands: Assen

Trea from Assen in the Netherlands sent me this card from her hometown:

She wrote a message explaining why there's a person on a motorcycle featured on the card:

Hello, this coming week is TT-week in Assen. Every year during the last weekend of June we have the Moto-GP at the TT-circuit. Thousands of motorcyclist fans visit the city at this time. All week long there's a festival, music lots of beer and of course lots of motorcycles. It is THE week of the year.

So I figured out that it had something to do with motorcycling races, but still had no idea what TT stood for... Off to Wikipedia I went.

TT stands for Tourist Trophy, and is part of the MotoGP World Championship. The Assen TT-circuit is known as "The Cathedral" of motorcycling, and since the first race held in 1925 it has been held every year other than 1935-1940. Everyone who knows a little bit about main events in European history will probably understand that's because WWII was in full swing. That makes it the longest running event on the MotoGP calendar.

The original races weren't held at the circuit like it is now, but people were racing on country roads through several villages in the area, which they later changed to a road circuit through some other town. In 1955 they built a whole new circuit close to the location of the original race and about a third of the length. Through it all though, the finish line never changed.

Now a little bit about the town for those of you who are curious. Assen is the capital of the province of Drenthe. They got their city rights in 180, but can trace the towns history until as early as 1258 when a monastery was planned to be built there, the town developed around it. All that is still left of that monastery is the Abbey Church, the terrain and bits and pieces of the wall.

What struck me while reading about the town is that the whole city center is closed off to motorvehicles! Pin It

United States: New York City

Next up, and last card for today, is this black and white card from Iva who lives in Garfield, NJ

Lower Manhattan skyline with the Brooklyn Bridge spanning over the East River

If there's one thing I learned from getting postcards already, it's that black and white cards are often just as nice as very colorful ones. It gives it a kind of vintage look if you ask me. I also learned that most cards I get, spike my curiosity and make me want to find out more about what is shown and the places they come from. Maybe when my kids are older, they can learn along with me about everything this big world has to offer.

I started out looking up New York City, but I quickly realized that would keep me busy until the next century, so I narrowed it down to looking up the Brooklyn Bridge mentioned in the description.

This bridge was completed in 1883 and is one of the oldest suspension bridges in the United States, connecting Manhattan and Brooklyn. It's 1,595.5 feet long and until 1903 it was the longest suspension bridge in the world, as well as the first steel-wire suspension bridge.

It is a multi-level bridge. The lower level is for motor vehicles, with 3 Brooklyn-bound lanes and 3 Manhattan-bound lanes. This lower level used to be for horse-drawn and trolley traffic, but as times changed, the bridge was adapted to accomodate motorized vehicles. The upper level is for bicycles and pedestrians.

In 1972 the Brooklyn Bridge was designated a National Historic Landmark, as well as a National Historic Civil Engineering Landmark in 1972.

Let me close this post with a little "fun fact" on the bridge: one of the anchorages of the bridge sits on the property of the Osgood House, where George Washington stayed with his family for his inauguration in 1789. He stayed there from April 1798 to February 1790. Since he had his private office there as well as the public business office, it became the first seat of the executive branch of the federal government.



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Taiwan: cloudy sky

This card was sent by Leona from Dalin, Taiwan:

This card doesn't give me much to discern about the country... other than that it looks like it's about to rain.

Leona wrote on the back of the card that Taiwan is a warm and beautiful place. I'm hoping to receive some more cards from here that show me more about the country


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Russia: Kyiv Bridges

This beautiful card was sent by Mara from Moscow, Russia:

The description says it's a bridge across the canal on Rusanivka embankment. That totally did not ring a bell, so off to research I went.

Turns out that even though this card was sent from Moscow, Russia, the card itself shows Kiev, the capital of  Ukraine. Rusanivka is a neighborhood in Kiev, surrounded by a canal and a tributary of the Dnieper river. That makes it look like an island.

The neighborhood was built as a "sleeping district", meaning there was/is no main industry there. It was meant to be a purely residential area under the Soviet plan. It wasn't even meant for people to each have their own cars! They figured it would be enough to have bus transportation and riverboats. Riverboats turned out to not be such a practical idea, so it ended up being just buses. As a result, there's very little parking, so most people walk across the bridges to catch buses or the metro.

I can see how this project failed a bit, there's actually plans for a living area in my hometown that's kind of like that. I really don't see many people buying a house in that new area in town. All houses will be built without driveways or garages. There will be a big parking lot in a somewhat central locations, where everyone has to park their cars, be it resident or visitor. It would be one thing to say they don't want visitors parking their cars on the street and making them park in the central parking lot. Annoying, but somewhat reasonable. But to have to park way out as a resident is going to be a major fail. Just imagine doing your grocery shopping for the week or month, then when you get "home" you still have to carry all your groceries two blocks or so until you get to your house. That's just all kinds of crazy. Pin It

Poland: two dogs

Agnieszka sent me this card from Walbrzych, Poland:

These two dogs are quite adorable. I'm not sure what breed these are though. There wasn't any description on the back, and she didn't write it in her message either. I still love the card though.

Looks like there's not all that much I can write about with today's card. Maybe more with the next one. Pin It

Finland: Rubber Duck

This cute rubber duck card was sent to me by Wynand from Espoo, Finland

According to the message she wrote on the back of the card, these rubber duckies are quite popular in Finland.

These rubber duck toys were becoming very popular thanks to Ernie in the children's tv show Sesame Street, who has one of these that he names Rubber Duckie. There's 3 different songs that he did about his rubber duck, I'm sure they're somewhere no youtube. Although if you have small children, there's a good chance that your head is already filled with all manner of Sesame Street songs anyway (like mine is).

Back then in the early 70's, the ducks were the standard yellow billed ducks, the "original" duckies. Nowadays you can find them in all kinds of colors and types. There's purple or red "evil" duckies with little devil horns, there's stripped, plaid and polka dotted ones, there's even black ones that float upside down pretending to be dead. And then of course the whole slew of holiday themed ones with red scarves, reindeer antlers, bunny ears, etc,...

What surprised me more than all the colors and patterns, is that there's such a thing as Ducky Derbies or rubber duck races. I had never heard of these until I (yes, you guessed it) consulted Wikipedia. There's a ton of these races all over the world, a lot of times to raise money for a certain cause. In this case, people pay to sponsor a duckie and then at the end of the day they dump all the duckies in a waterway and the person who sponsored the first duckie to cross the finish line wins a prize. Come to think of it, this might be a fun idea if you live near a creek or something and are looking for a fun game to do at your kids' birthday party. But in these "professional" races, there's a LOT of duckies competing! In the U.S., the largest of these races is the annual Freestore Foodbank Rubber Duck Regatta in Cincinnatti, OH with over 100,000 duckies racing. Since its start in 1994 the organization has raised over $ 4 million with these races. Not shabby at all me thinks.

I also found out about another fun rubber duck related story. In January 1992, a shipping container carrying almost 29,000 Friendly Floatees (a children's bath toy by The First Years, Inc.) in 4 different shapes (red beavers, green frogs, blue turtles and yellow duckies) were washed overboard when the ship they were being transported on got caught in a big storm. Somehow the container opened, and with the seawater the cardboard backings of the toys disintegrated, leaving all these rubber floaties to just drift in the ocean (since they have no holes in the bottom, the water doesn't get inside the toys).

These floatees have travelled all over the world so far, at least over the world they can reach by water.After 3 months, a lot of these were found along the coastlines of Indonesia, Australia and South America. About 10 months later some of these floatees started washing ashore in Alaska and Japan. Many of the ducks got trapped in the Arctic ice, which they moved through very slowly as the ice moved (about a mile a day) and were sighted in the North Atlantic in 2000. A lot of them were found in 2004 in New England, Canada and Iceland. In 2007 some of these toys made landfall on the Southwestern shores of the United Kingdom.

Donovan Hohn wrote a book about this in 2011 called " Moby-Duck, the true story of 28,800 bath toys lost at sea" Pin It

United States: Independence Hall

Today's card was sent by a 5-year-old girl named Ava-lea from Philadelphia, PA

The description on the back of the card reads

INDEPENDENCE HALL - Independence Hall is the location where the United States proclaimed Independence from Britain. On July 4th, 1776, the Liberty Bell rang out from the steeple, proclaiming the signing of the Declaration of Independence within this historical site. A nation was born

Ava, or rather her mom, also wrote on the card that the bell was moved from Independence Hall in 1976, and that Pennsylvania is spelled wrong on the Liberty Bell.

Now that intrigued me, so once again, more research was in order. I know what you're thinking, here we go again with Wikipedia. But no, this time I opted to just Google it (gotta love it when a noun becomes a verb).

It turns out that at the time the bell was cast and inscribed with the text "By Order of the Assembly of the Province of Pensylvania for the State House in Philada.", the spelling of Pennsylvania had not yet universally been adopted, and in fact it is also spelled without the second "n" in the original constitution as well as on the original map of the area that is displayed on the second floor of Independence Hall.

As of October 2003, the Liberty bell is on display in the Liberty Bell Center, where it can be seen 24/7 from the street. On every Fourth of July, at 2pm Eastern time, children who are descendants of Declaration signers symbolically tap the Liberty Bell 13 times while bells across the nation also ring 13 times in honor of the patriots from the original 13 states.

If you would like to read even more about this significant piece of U.S. history, I found all my info here: 
http://www.ushistory.org/libertybell/


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United States and the Netherlands

Well lookie here, my mailbox was double happy today! That's actually how they keep it in your stats on Postcrossing, they count the days your mailbox was happy that month.

The first card is from the Johnston family from Baton Rouge, LA:

They sent me a postcard of the Laura Plantation. The text on the back reads:

Laura Plantation, Vacherie, Lousiana. A raised Creole Villa built in 1805. The main house was rennovated in 1905. Listed on the National Register of Historic Places, it is the largest and oldest plantation complex in St. James Parish.

Upon reading the description, the first thing I noticed, is that apparently whoever wrote it out, didn't have a spelling checker available. No, the extra "n" in renovated wasn't a typo of mine, that is actually how it's printed on the card. But then again, it really doesn't matter much, since I only see the front picture in my folder anyway.

The house does look pretty though. I like that style of houses, just looking at it makes me want to find a comfortable rocking chair to put on that patio (which upon closer inspection there actually is one on the far right) and curl up with a cool drink and a good book. I am however really glad I'm not the one having to clean such a big house.

I did some more research on this place, and apparently it used to be called Duparc Plantation, and can be visited with guided tours. It's significance isn't just the big house but also the fact that several of the outbuildings are still there, even some of the slave quarters. It was actually built by a Frenchman who was a veteran from the American Revolution who had petitioned the U.S. president at the time to receive some land, and he got this place to secure his loyalties to the United States.


The second card came from Stephan, who lives in Waddinxveen in the Netherlands:

An adorable puppy!! It doesn't say what breed it is, but it looks like a golden retriever maybe? I'm not quite sure (other than it's not a dachshund), but no matter the breed this is a really cute card. This little fellow just makes me want to go over to pet him and scratch his ears.

On my Postcrossing profile, it lists the languages I speak (so people know in which languages they can write to me). Besides English, which is technically my fourth language, I also speak Dutch/Flemish (my native language), French and German. So Stephan decided to write the card in several languages as well, alternating between Dutch and English. Funny enough it took me a minute to realize it...

Once again I got the comment about sending a card to a U.S. address to have it end up in Germany (I have a feeling I'll get that a lot). He was funny though, adding that it really doesn't matter that the card will travel that far since he's not the one carrying it back and forth across the ocean.  Made me giggle. Pin It

Dog and kitty from Germany

After a week and a half of waiting my second "official" got here :)

This time I got a really cute card from Anja who lives in Bad Duerkheim, Germany:

The text on the card says "Ich bin stets interessiert, wenn jemand gut kuessen kann.". Anja was nice enough to provide the translation and a nice message on the back of the card:

"I'm always interested if somebody is a good kisser." Hello, This card will travel really far to make it all the way back to Germany. At least it will have seen some of the world. Happy Postcrossing, Anja.

 It does make it funny sometimes, when cards sent to me from Germany have to go all the way to the US, then back here to Germany. The joys of military life...

I really do love the card too. Cute animal cards like these are among my favorites, especially when they feature animals of the canine persuasion. We have two dachshunds, so cards with dogs and puppies go a very long way in putting a smile on my face!
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La Bella Italia: Venezia

This is the second card that I found yesterday:

My parents sent it to my grandparents on 10 August 2009. I really do like this card a lot, especially how the pictures are on a background of flowers. It kinda makes the color "pop". To me, the colors just scream Summer.

I don't know overly much about Venice, especially since I wasn't on the trip with them to learn all about it. My dad would invariably get a Michelin travel guide on whatever area we would be traveling too, just like I would invariably read the first few chapters in it. The ones that give an overview of the area's history, geography and stuff like that. That's me, always reading something. Right now I'm reading a prehistoric novel, series actually. Which has absolutely nothing to do with postcards, but I'm also kinda random like that.

Anyway, for lack of a Michelin guide, I consulted the next best thing: the all-knowing Wikipedia (too bad I didn't find out about that until my last year of college, would've been so handy for the 12,345,678 reports on all manner of subjects during the previous 14 years of school).

Venice is named for the people who inhabited the region around the 10th century BC, the Veneti. Apparently, Venice is not what I thought to be a city with some canals in it (kinda like Bruges in Belgium if anyone's ever been there). It's actually a group of around 120 small islands that are connected with bridges and have those canals separating them. The whole city is listed as UNESCO World Heritage Site.

The city used to be the capital of the Republic of Venice from the late 7th century until 1797 (more than a millenium!) but lost its independence when they were conquered by Napoleon Bonaparte. At that point they kind of got tossed around between Austria and the Kingdom of Italy a few times until they finally stayed a part of Italy.

I can see where the tourism comes from, the city looks beautiful from the few pictures on the card! Maybe one day I'll be lucky enough to be able to visit there as well. I do still treasure the painted mask my mom brought back for me as a souvenir, and it's proudly displayed on my living room wall along with our German cuckoo clock, Belgian non-working clock (but it's shaped like the country so I like the way it looks), some pictures from Texas and some Korean wire. Just to keep things international I guess...

But back to the actual card. The stamp on it was kind of nice:

The stamp belongs to the "Made in Italy" series and there's around 3.5 million printed. It has the Sant' Agatha Bolognese mark, which is the bull on the black background. To my knowledge (which is very limited when it comes to stamps), this stamp was released in 2007. Pin It

Hot Springs State Park in Wyoming

More rummaging in the attic produced two more postcards (hidden in with a box of baby bottles no less!!). This is the first of the two:

I sent this card to my grandparents on 23 April 2009. It was right before my husband deployed to Afghanistan, and since at the time it was still just us two (and our two dachshunds, but no kiddos yet), we decided to drive the 19 hours from where we lived in Killeen, TX to Thermopolis, WY during block leave to visit his grandmother who lives there. I hadn't even been in the US for a whole year yet, so I greatly welcomed the opportunity to see a new place and be able to add another state to my list of "States visited". That made 3 after Florida and Texas, not counting New York, New Jersey and Illinois, since all I saw of those states was the inside of the airports.

This area was so much different from what I grew up with in Belgium, and Texas! Half the time when we woke up in the mornings, there were a few deer in his grandma's back yard eating fruit out of the trees. I got to see bison for the first time in my life, and eat it too. The state maintains a herd of bison on the edge of town. You can drive your car into the pasture and follow a dirt road through it. If you're lucky, you can see the animals graze. We got to see them off in the distance, but never close by. There's lots of mountains around too.

Thermopolis is the southernmost municipality in the Big Horn Basin, and gets its name from the hot springs located here, and is Greek for "Hot City". The largest one is shown on the card. The back of the card says

The Big Spring is the world's largest mineral hot spring, flowing 18,600,000 gallons of water per day at a constant temperature of 135 degrees.

For people who aren't familiar with gallons and degrees Fahrenheit (like me... I still need to use the converter app on my best friend Mr. iPhone), that would be 70.408.659,18 liters per day at a temperature of 57.22 degrees Celcius. In other words, a whole lot of hot water! These springs are open to the public for free as part of a treaty that was signed in 1896 with the Shoshone and Arapaho Indian tribes.
Their swimming pool uses water from the springs and is an outdoor pool that is open year round since the water is hot. They actually cool it down in a different basin first because it's TOO hot to be swimming in it. That hot water must be a nice way to warm up in winter, although I don't think I'd enjoy getting out of the water outside. Pin It

While I'm waiting...

It's been a few days since I got my first card, and I'm still anxiously waiting to receive a second one through Postcrossing.

Since I had nothing better to do, I'd been rummaging through some boxes in the attic looking for something I can't even remember what it was, I found a couple cards that had randomly been put in a box when we moved here from Texas. Gotta love how movers keep stuff where it's supposed to be at. I found the cards in a box with bedding.

This first card is one I remember very well. It was sent in 2006, and I was actually the one to send it.

Every year my parents would take me and my brother on a trip somewhere, usually within Europe (I was born and raised in Belgium, where my whole family still lives, I moved away after marrying my husband). But this year was my parents' 25th wedding anniversary, and with me being 21 that year, it would be one of the last times I'd actually be with them on the summer vacation. So my mom finally caved in agreeing to travel by plane (she's always been afraid to fly), and suggested a short flight within Europe to see if she was ok with flying. My dad and myself suggested to go to the US instead, arguing that if she didn't like it, she'd still have to go back home. We'd always talked about some day touring Florida. Me and my dad are big Disney fans, so we wanetd to go to Disney World, and suggested we'd do that in case she didn't want to fly again, we'd at least have seen Disney World. Apparently we made a good case, because they booked a guided bus tour around the state, and then we tacked on a couple days Disney World.

I was dating this really sweet guy, who is now my husband by the way, and sent him this card while on our trip. I got it in Miami, FL since that was the only place we spent more than a few hours and I actually had time to get a card, write it and get it mailed off to him (thanks to a very friendly receptionist who helped me get a stamp for it and put it in with the hotel's mail).

These two were given to me by my parents. They brought them back for me later that fall when they went on a weekend trip to France. I like them both, for two very different reasons. The second one because it shows the Christmas decorations in the town, and I'm a sucker for Christmas-y cards. And how adorable is that little kitty among the decorations???

The first one I love because of the memories that just seeing the town's name brings back. And no, I've never set foot in the town at all. You see, my parents are pretty good tricksters, and had told us we'd be going there on one of our summer trips back in 1994 (I was 9 and my brother 6) when in all reality we were going to the Euro Disney Resort in Paris, but they had wanted to surprise us. My mom especially was surprised that it worked, because every season I made her go to the travel agency to pick up the new brochures for Disney (yes, I was a Disney nut even at a young age) and would show her which attractions I'd want to do, which hotel I wanted to stay at and what restaurants to eat at. Well, that year I actually got to do all of that :-D

Last one for this entry. I got this one in 2009, also from my parents. It was the year after my husband and I had to move away from Belgium, and got stationed in Texas. Lucky for me, that's where he's from and his parents lived only a few hours away. I say lucky, because he ended up deploying to Afghanistan. This card was actually sent to me at his parents' house because I spent so much time there while he was away.

My parents traveled to Hungary that summer, and sent me this card from Budapest. That's one country that they traveled to that I haven't. It sure looks pretty there. I like the top picture where it shows the castle with the flowers.

That's it for today. Hopefully I get another card soon! Pin It

My first card received!

For a while now I've been interested in joining Postcrossing, after I heard about it from a friend of mine. Ever since I was a little kid, I loved summer, because that's when everybody (or at least a lot of my family) would go on vacation and send us a postcard from wherever they happened to go that year. Maybe next time I go visit my family I should look for my box of old birthday cards, there may be a few postcards in there still.

Anyway, this day and age not that many people still send postcards. It is so much easier to shoot people an e-mail telling them they're still alive out there and having fun (or not so much fun sometimes) on their vacation. So in an attempt to sate my craving for more cards, I joined Postcrossing. (small update: sating the craving didn't work out that well, now one year later it has turned into more of an addiction)

I sent out my first 5 cards on May 15th, 2012. I didn't have much to report until nown, because of how Postcrossing works. Once you sign up, you create a profile telling a little bit about yourself, and stating the types of postcards you like to receive. This is just a suggestion of course, we don't MAKE people get you a certain type of card, just if they happen to have one that fits your interests, they can pick that one. Then you can request up to 5 addresses of people somewhere in the world. These addresses are selected at random, so you never know which country you'll be sending a card to. It could be to your neighbor, or to somebody in the Phillipines or Russia or any other place on this earth. You get a unique code for each address you request, that you write on the card. This is what the receiver uses to register your card once they receive it. At the time your card is registered, your address will be given to a random user of the site to mail you a postcard in return.

So here we are, two weeks later, and I received my very first card from another Postcrossing user:

It was sent to me by Brenda from Chilliwack, Canada. The picture shows the Parliament buildings in Ottawa, Ontario. According to the description on the back of the card, they were built in the 1860's. 

I love how it has a mountie on it too, with my husband in the military I like cards with a military theme, or just some details that remind me of the military.

Let's see where the next card will be coming from :)

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