花捲窩

      Getting postcards from far away places is always a thrill; it’s for me a way to connect with my friends all over the earth. One Chinese guy studying in the Netherlands

 Recently I got one postcard that’s so special I think it will be collected by the National Palace Museum when I am no longer. It’s from an American guy in New Hampshire, a flatmate I knew back in the good ol’ Utrecht. On the card he says it was snowing very hard where he was then and that he is going to study in Barcelona for a year, but none of the above is the point. The recipient’s address he put on the card contains, interestingly, merely the door number, floor, alley, City and country, which means the street name is missing! As I was just wondering how this postcard managed to find its destination, I saw a handwritten note attached to it which must have been from the postman, saying that they “tried” sending it to me by guessing the street name. And they did succeed!! I really have to have more respect for the postmen working at Taiwan Post Services, for besides the regular task of delivering mails and packages, they have to do the brainstorming activities of filling out blanks, a job that seems to me almost cryptogrammic.

And the Royal Dutch postmen couldn’t even deliver one well-addressed postcard? Viva the Oranjes.