Pen Pal Story: Jeanette and Rosita
Today I wanted to share a pen pal story with my readers and customers. In the Pen Pal Survey, you all said overwhelmingly that you want to read Pen Pal Stories, so today I have one from Postcrossing.com, which is an awesome online community that allows people from all over the world to send and receive postcards. You can read the original post here, but I’ll sum the whole story up in my own words below and give a link to Postcrosser’s sign up page at the bottom of this post.
It’s cool to hear about people who correspond through the mail and end up meeting in real life, but this story is extra special because these girls actually met in person and became friends before they even realized they had written each other before.
The two pen pals, Jeanette from Denmark and Rosita from Hong Kong, first sent each other a postcard through the “direct swap” on Postcrossing.com, but after that, weren’t in contact again. The blog post on Postcrossing’s website says, “But life goes on, and after receiving their nice cards, both girls slowly forgot about each other.”
Time went by and neither one of them thought anything of it, until a year later when Jeanette moved to Hong Kong, where Rosita lived, to study abroad. This isn’t that strange or coincidental either, since both girls swapped postcards often on Postcrosser and had a collection from all over the world.
One day, through some crazy chance, they both ended up sharing a bus seat with one another, which was abnormal because Jeanette usually took a different bus, but she had stayed later at school that day. Rosita was with two other girls, who shared the empty seat in front of Jeanette, while Rosita took the seat next to her. The two other friends urged Rosita to make conversation with Jeanette. The post doesn’t mention why Rosita’s friends were trying to get the two strangers to converse. The girls didn’t know each other at the time, didn’t recognize each other, or realize that they had met once before on paper.
They must have got on well, because they chatted on the bus and even exchanged contact information. Later that day, they were chatting online, probably getting acquainted, when Jeanette, still pretty new to Hong Kong, asked Rosita whether she knew if a tube for shipping posters could be purchased at the post office.
After that, Rosita went into a passionate spiel about the post office and her postcard and stamp collection. Jeanette remarked that she had a postcard collection, too, and then sent Rosita a picture of the wall in her bedroom where they were all displayed. The two then realized that they were both Postcrossers, but it still didn’t dawn on them that they had corresponded before!
It wasn’t until Rosita remembered she had once received a postcard from Denmark, which is where Jeanette had said she had originally come from. So Rosita found the postcard, flipped it over, and recognized the handwriting from the note that she had received earlier on the bus… the postcard said ESBJERG on the bottom, denoting the city it came from.
Rosita called Jeanette in a hurry. When Jeanette tells the story, she said Rosita screamed into the phone, and she describes the interaction like this: “Jeanette, do you live in a city called E-S-B-J-E-R-G?!”, to which I answered “Yeah, how do you know that?!”. She screamed again: “We exchanged postcards a year ago!!”
The girls decided to get breakfast the very next morning before class. They describe it as being so surreal and six months later, when Jeanette wrote Postcrosser.com to tell them the story, the two were still in the habit of meeting up for food or drinks.
I imagine they continued their friendship for the rest of Jeanette’s school term, and I really hope they became pen pals once again when it ended.
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