week 8

Instant Messaging, Internet Relay Chat, Skype. That was the topic of our last session. And these are very important keywords for an overseas student like me.
The first time I was for a longer period abroad was in 2004. At that time I called my family with special phone cards which made it cheaper to call from Italy to Germany. My friends got mails and both family and friends got from time to time postcards and letters from me. Because I didn´t want to make the internet bill of my hostfamily so expensive, first I wrote my mails with winword before I went online to mail them – very complicated.
This time it´s different. I skype regularly with my family and friends, sometimes with video sometimes without video. It´s a cheap alternative to calling. My room mate and I, we have a homepage where our friends can read what happened the last time and see some images of our adventures. I write postcards, mails, sms, I chat with friends or post on the facebook/studivz pages of them. But I don´t write letters anymore. It´s a pity because letters are very nice. I have still boxes full of letters of my first stay abroad. Letters are very special: the content is much more deeper and more important than the content of postcards or mails. People think longer about what they will write than they do when they write mails. The handwriting is unique and tells you a lot about the adresser – male or female? Old or young? Is it usual white paper or is it colourful? Maybe with some drawings? Put the author some perfume on it? A letter is a visual and haptic experience, but it can be an olfactory experience as well.
To my 20th birthday I got a letter from a very very close friend. On the envelope stood ´Open carefully!´. How could I open a letter otherwise? I opened it…carefully, but not in the way my friend wanted me to. In the end my floor was full of confetti. To open a special letter can be an experience that you will never forget. But to open a mail feels always the same. Nothing special, nothing unique about it. It´s also easier to delete a mail than to throw a letter away, especially when it´s handwritten. As fast as you can write a mail, sms etc as fast you can delete it. But a letter: somebody took time to write it, it took time to get to the addressee. It´s not so easy to throw a letter away. What makes them to very good souvernirs.