Penpals around the world: 1990s vs 2020s

Howdy Amanda, I’m having a biology lesson now. My teacher is at the moment walking around showing everyone a … (redacted because it was icky!)

So began a typical letter from my Singaporean penpal Audrey back in 1990. I have a fun box of letters in the bottom of my cupboard, with colourful envelopes covered in stamps and stickers, and missives like this from the penpals I corresponded with in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Ah, those were the days!

My first penpal came from our trip to Europe - my family met Sara’s family in a caravan park near Venice, and we wrote to each other for years. When I was reminded of this while recording a Van Life Diaries episode last year, I went looking for Sara and found someone who I thought might be her on Facebook. I sent this person a random “were you my penpal?” message, and after a few months, Sara actually got back onto Facebook, saw my message and replied - yes, it’s her! And incredibly, she had just been going through her old belongings too and found some letters from me. Crazy!

Most of my penpals, though, were people I’d never met in real life, and we found each other through an airline magazine. My family flew with Cathay Pacific to Europe in 1985, and my sister and I signed up to their “Young Discovers” club. This meant we got a quarterly magazine and could put our names and details into their “penpals wanted” section. I ended up writing to people in Sweden, the US, Singapore, England and more, along with Germany after we hosted German exchange students in the early 1990s.

I absolutely loved checking the mail at home - there’s no 2020s equivalent to regularly receiving beautiful snail mail letters! When I look back on the letters I’ve saved, it seems like as young teenagers, we were surprisingly the same all around the world, and talked about problems at school and issues with our friends, even though our circumstances varied quite significantly. I think that really cemented my interest in getting to know people in lots of places, something that of course only deepened the more I travelled as an adult.

Then I grew up, and so did my penpals, and the frequency of our letters faded until they all stopped. My grandmother and I sent snail mail letters to each other all through the early 2000s, when I lived abroad, and then sadly she passed away just after I returned to Western Australia in 2006. From that time on, I never looked forward to the letterbox again.

That didn’t mean I’d stopped meeting new people in places across the world, but the way we met and corresponded changed a lot thanks to blogging and social media. I have dozens of close friends, and hundreds of friends, from many different countries, who I’ve met online, either because they’ve found their way to being guests on The Thoughtful Travel Podcast, or been listeners who’ve joined my Facebook group, or just responded to my posts on Instagram.

I’ve had the good fortune to meet a number of these people in real life, either by travelling together or meeting up in their (current) hometowns, and this is very special indeed. But our correspondence has built up sentence by sentence - a comment on a post, a quick DM in Instagram, an email here or there, but quite different to the olden days of letter writing.

This sounds like such a commercial sponsor shoutout but honestly, it was a revelation when Slowly approached me to sponsor a series. (In all seriousness: writing a Substack post about penpals isn’t even part of our agreement - I just am so enamoured with my new penpals and think many of you might like to be too!).

When Slowly first emailed me, my initial thought was that penpals over the Internet will be nothing like the penpals of my childhood. But they have been smart, and created an ecosystem of penpals that mimics “the olden days” in a surprisingly accurate way. As the name suggests, the letters you write are delivered slowly - not instantly, the way most internet communications happen. Depending on the distance between you and your penpal, your letter may take a few hours or even almost a couple of days to arrive. This has created a situation where you don’t just write a couple of lines - you actually compose a real letter, and then get excited when you see that one is on its way back to you.

You can see in the first screenshot that I’m expecting a letter from my new friend in Ghana, but I have to wait until tomorrow! They have also included the fun of colourful stamps - the second screenshot has some of the stamps I’ve collected over time, and I love choosing which one I will send to my penpals.

The other wonderful part of my new penpal collection (because yes, I have developed a collection of new friends - I now correspond at least monthly with people in Penang, Uganda, Zürich, southern Germany, Türkiye, South Korea, Taipei and Osaka!) is that Slowly does a good job of helping you match with interesting and relevant people. You can see in my third screenshot that I’ve described myself by selecting a bunch of topics I’d like to talk about, and this then seems to help relevant people contact me. I’ve also been the first to write to people who’ve submitted an “Open Letter” who’ve sounded like people I might really like or have a lot in common with. That includes a couple of people who write in German, which has been brilliant for my language practice.

Speaking from my own experiences - in the past four or five months I’ve corresponded with a dozen or so people, mostly multiple times - people on Slowly send thoughtful letters, the way that penpals did back in snail mail days, with some news of their lives, some questions, and some answers. Everyone uses fun usernames, and it sometimes takes a while before I disclose that my name is Amanda, or they tell me their real name. As a rule, it’s just text, although you can mutually agree to share photos, too. It’s honestly so similar to the “good old days” and quite addictive!

As an adult, I think I’ve only discussed penpals with my friend Nel aka the Barefoot Backpacker, because like me they had a lot of penpals in their younger years, and even some they continued corresponding with into early adulthood.

It never occurred to that I’d come back to penpal letter writing as an adult, but it’s something that I’ve picked back up with much passion!

Have you had penpals? Do you have any now?

(Disclosure of a sort … this post isn’t actually sponsored by Slowly - who are sponsoring my Chats with Locals series on the podcast - but they certainly inspired it and I love them for that! What’s better than running a podcast that gets sponsored by companies with the perfect matching values, hey?!)