Mail call!

Yay, finally I have some letters to show you! It's been a while! Well, mailmen in my district are still on strike (it's been 3 weeks now), but it seems that my maillady has given up on this strike because I got a quite high pile of mail hitting my mailbox today! Well, I know for sure that at least two pieces of mail are missing (a book I've ordered and an envelope from my mother). But let's cross our fingers they will follow tomorrow or on Monday!

Before starting to show off all the letters I have to say that I'm really, really pissed of how mail employees treated my mail while it was patientely waiting in a post office : out of the six envelopes I received, three   (so half of them) were damaged.. First this envelope from Norway got torn :

The letter from Brazil got completely wet (fortunately my penpal had written with a ball pen!)

However now the stickers she enclosed are totally unusable :(

And finally, the worst happened with this envelope, that contained a book I had ordered. Look how torn it is! :O

And look what happened to the book inside. For me who's the fussiest as far as my books are concerned, I was close to tears... Bloody mail people.

Anyway. At least these pieces of mail aren't lost, so I shouldn't complain so much. Let me now show you all the letters :)

First there is a letter on Kawaii paper from Louise in the UK:

Then the wet letter from Bruna in Brazil. Nice to catch up with her news, her last letter was from back in September:

From Heidi in Finland. A long catch-up with her as well, as I hadn't heard of her since October. And she enclosed my first Nordqvist tea! This brand doesn't exist in France, that's why I never had any opportunity to try it before.

The letter with the torn stamp was from Marita in Norway. She included wonderful pictures of snowy Norway (though now that the weather has jumped from winter to summer, it's a bit "weird" to see snow...)

And last but not least, from Andra in Romania. A typed letter, yet I did enjoy it anyway!

Aaand, I even have some outgoing letters to present here! Yes, I did write lately! 

The first letter is to Tanja in Germany. Well, I wrote it more than two weeks ago, but haven't uploaded any pictures on the blog yet because I hadn't any other letters to show.

And eventually I wrote this letter to Ksenia, which took me 15 days. It's not extremely long (usually my letters to her are a bit longer than this one), but I was so very busy lately that I hardly could find enough time and energy to start writing even a paragraph or two.

That's all for today! Hopefully I'll get all my mail back soon and won't have to worry anymore! I know going on strike is French people's favourite sport but c'mon mailmen, 3 weeks of strike are enough now!

Have a lovely weekend, all!

Love, Tári

Tell me your secrets...

Hello everyone! 

No, this won't be a mail update again. I haven't written and gotten enough letters to make a mail post yet. In fact, I should have gotten some pieces of mail but... mailmen in my district have been on strike since the beginning of April so it's a bit messy with mail lately. I should have gotten two penpals letters + a book I've ordred but no, still nothing. I just hope that everything will show up soon and that the strike won't affect on my sent or received letters! I'd hate if me or my penpals have to resend letters and swaps because of this stupid strike! Grrr!!

But well, the aim of that post wasn't to complain about mail people ;) So let's move on to the facts.

As you may (not) know, I'm also the owner of a books blog (you can find it here, but beware, it's all in French!). We're quite a lot of books bloggers in France and we have our little "rituals". One of them is called "Top Ten Tuesday" and, as you can guess it from the title, it's about making a list of 10 items according to a given topic, every Tuesday. This week the topic was: "your top 10 secrets as a reader" and I thought I could also make a "top 10 secrets as a letter writer" too. 

1- I always write letters one after another. I know many letters writers have several letters in progress, but I just can't. I would just mix everything and forget many of the things I planned to say to the first person while writing to the second and vice versa. That'd be too confusing.

2- I like it when my letters papers fit the season. I obviously don't always use seasonal papers, but I would feel really weird sending a letter on a paper with flowers pattern in winter or on a paper with snow patterns in summer.

3- I used to always fully re read a letter before starting replying it, but now most of the letters I get are too long to do so, re reading them fully in one sitting is too long. So I just re read paragraph by paragraph as I write the reply.

4- I'm always listening to music while writing a letter. I simply don't like doing it in a completely silent background. I even have a "writing letters" playlist in my MP3 player, which contains my most favourite songs at the moment.

5- It has already happened to me to miss my underground station because I was too busy reading a letter, and didn't noticed I had to get off.

6- I love to write in bed, but hardly ever do so because then I have to use paper which is lined on both sides, otherwise my handwriting goes awfully up and down. And the only papers I have which are lined on both sides are plain white papers that I don't like to use so much because I prefer more colourful papers.

7- I often wonder whether the maillady will miss me or feel relieved when I move. I mean, I don't know whether she likes delivering fancy envelopes in my mailbox or if she's tired of seeing them.

8- I am a list maniac and I keep a list of my sent/received mail on two differents places: a notebook, and my listography account. Which is kind of useless, I don't need to have this recorded twice, but well. 

9- I noticed that the smaller the paper I'm using is, the smaller my handwriting gets. That's why I don't like using really small papers, because my letters looks really short then, while they aren't actually.

10- Before starting writing letters, I thought I was uninteresting and had nothing to share with others. Thanks to penpalling, I realized I actually can be a chatterbox. I just haven't found anyone in my day-to-day life whom I feel like sharing all my stories with.

Well, I hope you liked reading my "secrets"! I'd love to read yours too, if you're willing to share! 

Love, Tári

What's in your bag?

Today normally is the mail update day, but I have nothing else to share you mailwise than a letter I wrote this week. So, I'm going for a non related mail post today and I'll write a "mail call" when I have more pieces of mail to share.

Today's post will be about what's in my bag. I've seen this idea on several other blogs already (don't ask me which ones, because I saw this quite long ago and I don't remember at all who wrote these posts) and found it interesting, so why not sharing this myself?

So, here's my bag. It's my handbag. To go to university I use another one, a bigger one :)

And what's inside...

First, the usual and essential things: my wallet, keys, phone, umbrella and cards: the green is my student card, the blue is for train and the red for bus, metro and tramway.

Then some other useful things: pills, hands cream, tissues, train and bus schedules.

And finally some not so essential but still useful things :) Earphones, a notepad and two pencils, and the book I'm currently reading (I never go anywhere without a book ^^)

That's quite a lot of things that can fit in this rather small bag! ;) 

Have a lovely week-end,

Love, Tári