Frodo’s Neighborhood

Made it into the top-10 card senders in Israel. 167 cards in less than a year. Yeeha!

After stirring the contents of the composter a bit, I discovered some huge roaches running around the box.
Doctor, is that normal?

Lanterns by the Bell Caves, Beit Guvrin 2009.

Lanterns

KEY, v.

To vandalize a car by scratching the sides with a key (e.g. "His new Mercedes was keyed last night in the parking lot").

Yesterday morning was one of my pre-planned days off. I decided to just drive for an hour, and then stop someplace to take landscape photos. The choice fell on the Beit Guvrin nature reserve in the South, a place with many different kinds of caves. I know the place pretty well, so I decided in advance which caves I should visit. I started with the columbarium, proceeded to the "musicians' cave", and finished with the huge "bell caves", the jewel in the crown. All went well and uneventful until I noticed that my cell phone was missing. I knew for sure that I had seen it by the columbarium, but after that I wasn't sure. I searched the car, nothing. Went back to all the caves I visited, trying to pick the phone's Bluetooth signal every once in a while with my car's hands-free device (it's detachable) - still nothing.

In total despair I stopped at the gift shop, where I had gotten some postcards in the middle of the route. The nice Russian-speaking ladies at the shop were surprised to see me the second time. I told them about my trouble, and they immediately contacted all the park's personnel to inquire whether anyone had seen the phone. Nobody had. I started contemplating about how much a new phone should cost, when the store keeper offered me to take her own personal phone for the search. "Call your cell every once in a while" she said. I was touched by the trust invested in me, but wasn't very optimistic.

I went for a 3rd round of the park, and climbed up to the columbarium. After 2-3 calls I thought I heard my phone's funny ringtone from afar. Was it in the cave? No, the music sounded further away. And then I found it, lying in the bushes, safe and sound. It must have dropped from my pouch pocket. What a relief! I drove back to the gift shop and thanked the lady. She was beaming with joy. "Throw that stupid gadget away, it's no use!" (she was referring to the hands-free device). I won't, not just yet. Still, I should get me a new phone. Whoever You are, thanks for the friendly reminder.

There's a curious feature in Postcrossing, a feature that users can activate or deactivate at will. It's called "send to repeated countries". It's relatively new. According to the FAQ page that explains it, enabling this feature will cause Postcrossing to stop trying to diversify your random card destinations. Instead of sending mail to as many countries as possible, it will target the "heavy hitters", i.e. countries with most active users and most sent cards. They claim that checking this box will help the system maintain balance, without disturbing the diversity of postcards being sent to you. This is very important, because nobody wants to see images of USA and Finland time and again, right?

In any case, I selected this feature a couple of months ago, and tried to analyze the effect. First of all, you see a dramatic increase in American, German and Finnish destinations. This could be expected, as they are the most intensive Postcrossing users. Second, the far-east countries disappear almost completely. You rarely get China, Taiwan or Japan. There is no visible effect on received cards, so they're keeping their promise. All in all, the card turnaround increased from around 15 per month to 25, which is good for me (more sent = more received).

But the greatest benefit of all is this: you finally get to send cards to people who can understand English! I am sure that Chinese and Japanese people come with the best of intentions, but their level of English is usually pretty basic. I don't even dare to use cursive, as there's no chance in hell they'll give the back of the card a second glance. All in all, I'm happy with it. The Jane Smiths and Matti Virtanens can expect to get more Israeli cards in the near future.