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Posted: July 30th, 2010 Hope Yancey

Travel, whether to another city, another region, or another country, often provides insight into other cultures and our own. This is an occasional series on what we can learn when we go somewhere else.

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The first letter dated Aug. 2, 1989, arrived when I was 15, and it is difficult to believe how many years have passed. For Thomas and me, it was the start of a conversation that spans more than two decades and two continents.

We connected through the International Friendship League, an organization “dedicated to promoting peace and better world understanding” among members.

I’d had other pen pals from around the world, including Australia, France, Japan, Malta and Nepal. Some lived in the United States, like curly-haired Katie near Utica, New York, a talented artist I envied for having an identical twin sister.

Most of the letters, postcards, photos and keepsakes, like the friendships themselves, are long gone, a casualty of the fickleness of youth and geographic distance. One, however, continues to leave its stamp on me.

My friendship with Thomas, who was from Jakobstad, Finland, would never have existed without the United States Postal Service. E-mail and instant messaging weren't popular yet, so we communicated the old-fashioned way with stationery, colorful postage and those ubiquitous little airmail stickers. “Please reply as soon as you can – I love getting (and writing) long letters!” he urged.

I don’t know whether it was our shared affinity for U2, the enthusiasm for writing that radiated from his first response to me, or something else, but the letters began flying back and forth. It didn’t hurt that his birthday was Oct. 31, my favorite American holiday.

Thomas seemed sophisticated, having visited places such as the Faroe Islands and Canary Islands. I was not born into a family of intrepid travelers, and until my early 20s, circumstances economic and otherwise  limited my trips to the Carolinas and Georgia. And I had yet to travel by airplane or train.

The most exotic journeys I took were those of my daydreams and imagination. If I could not yet go out there in the world, I would find a way to bring it home to me in the North Carolina mill town where I grew up.

Fast forward six years to the summer of 1995. I was on a college study tour, visiting Germany, Austria, Switzerland, France, and tiny Liechtenstein, Berlitz phrase books in hand.

Thomas was completing an internship with an architectural firm in Karlsruhe, the German industrial city, a short distance from my tour group’s stop in the French city of Strasbourg. We arranged to meet at the Hotel des Princes.

Tall and lanky with blond hair and green eyes, he dressed formally for the occasion, causing me to instantly regret my casual American tourist uniform of blue jeans and T-shirt. He joined the sightseeing, and when a speaker asked the Americans if anyone in the crowd knew the capital of the European Union, fed me the correct answer, “Brussels,” under his breath.

As we rested in a café, I commented that it was surreal to finally come face-to-face with the author of the piles of letters I had stashed away. He paused before finally agreeing, “I know what you mean.”

Our lengthy correspondence has borne witness to countless major world events, beginning with the fall of the Berlin Wall – and just as many milestones of a personal nature. Though most of it takes place electronically now, I am grateful for my pen pal who lives in Stockholm and speaks Swedish, English and several other languages, and for what the relationship has brought to my life, including an admiration for the Scandinavian countries and their commitment to social equality.

Cultivating this friendship stretched my horizons at a time when they most needed expanding, helped fine-tune my worldview and taught me that the interesting things in life are in the details.

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Hope Yancey is a freelance writer who lives in Charlotte.

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