{"id":1776,"date":"2013-04-02T21:09:04","date_gmt":"2013-04-02T19:09:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/kosma.pl\/diaries\/2013\/04\/02\/writing-letters\/"},"modified":"2016-03-08T07:27:33","modified_gmt":"2016-03-08T06:27:33","slug":"writing-letters","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kosma.pl\/diaries\/2013\/04\/02\/writing-letters\/","title":{"rendered":"Writing letters"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/33.media.tumblr.com\/0c06d5e52ae9b922e23b17dbe22c11d2\/tumblr_inline_mknc12ZB001qz4rgp.jpg\" \/><\/p>\n<p>I&rsquo;m a big fan of writing letters. If you haven&rsquo;t received a letter in years, that&rsquo;s probably because you haven&rsquo;t sent one either. Here&rsquo;s what you need to start doing it again.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Stamps. If you live in Poland, I&rsquo;ll be happy to tell you that the tariffs were simplified considerably in January 2013 &#8211; right now, almost everything you can stuff in a not-too-big envelope ships at the same rate (normal: 1,60z\u0142, priority: 2,35z\u0142). You buy the stamps at the post office (yes, I&rsquo;m playing Captain Obvious here) and receive the accompanying PRIORITAIRE stickers if you choose that service. I recommend using priority services &#8211; otherwise, your letter can take many days &#8211; or even weeks &#8211; to arrive.<\/li>\n<li>Envelopes. You can get the plain ones at the post office too, but I recommend getting some quality ones. I have my two <a href=\"http:\/\/papiernajatkach.pl\/\">favorite<\/a> <a href=\"http:\/\/www.telpen.pl\/\">shops<\/a> &#8211; you can probably find some in your town.<\/li>\n<li>Writing paper. Personally, I buy high-density decorative A4 paper and cut it into four pieces, each 10x15cm in size. You can use anything that strikes your fancy here &#8211; for example, I have a few sheets of very old paper for special occasions. Generally, everything works &#8211; just avoid the plain paper.<\/li>\n<li>Addresses of your friends. Try to get them in a non-obvious manner &#8211; so they won&rsquo;t suspect you&rsquo;re going to send them anything.<\/li>\n<li>Optional: quality pen\/pencil. Letters are best handwritten &#8211; I tried typewriting once, but found it too impersonal; it doesn&rsquo;t help to have a machine between people.<\/li>\n<li>Optional: stationery. Quality stationery is almost impossible to get &#8211; all they print today are some roses and puppies, perfumed with rose fragrance. Ugh.<\/li>\n<li>Optional: photographs. Writing letters is hard at first &#8211; I actually started by sending people printed photographs. The size that fits the standard envelopes is 10x15cm and you can print that in every photo lab for next to nothing.<\/li>\n<li>Even more optional: anything you find appropriate. You can put small flat objects in the envelope &#8211; pages from a book, bus tickets, leaves, rocks, kittens&hellip; okay, photocopies of kittens.<\/li>\n<li>Finally: time and courage. These one are the hardest to find.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>When you actually succeed in writing a letter, you put the address on the envelope &#8211; the way you were taught in school &#8211; and toss the letter in a mailbox (the red one on the street, not the one at your front door ;). Then you wait &#8211; these days it takes people a while to check their mail &#8211; but it does arrive at some day. And then, some other day, you might open your mailbox and find something waiting for you. ;)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&rsquo;m a big fan of writing letters. If you haven&rsquo;t received a letter in years, that&rsquo;s probably because you haven&rsquo;t sent one either. Here&rsquo;s what you need to start doing it again. Stamps. If you live in Poland, I&rsquo;ll be happy to tell you that the tariffs were simplified considerably in January 2013 &#8211; right [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[237],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1776","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-journals"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kosma.pl\/diaries\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1776","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kosma.pl\/diaries\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kosma.pl\/diaries\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kosma.pl\/diaries\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kosma.pl\/diaries\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1776"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/kosma.pl\/diaries\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1776\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2188,"href":"https:\/\/kosma.pl\/diaries\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1776\/revisions\/2188"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kosma.pl\/diaries\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1776"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kosma.pl\/diaries\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1776"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kosma.pl\/diaries\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1776"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}