Letters

As you know, I've got a letter project going on. Nothing much...just write one letter a week to a different friend/acquaintance and then two more per month to the same people. It's been great fun, and now that I'm almost done, I've got some ponderings to do.

To repeat or not to repeat? That is the question. And that is a question that won't be decided until the end of December.

However, I have recently discovered a new, far more serious pondering that requires my full attention: the dilemma of international postal systems. How do they work? How does a letter addressed to a city in a different country (whose name might be spelled differently depending on the language) still arrive at its proper destination?

Can anyone answer that, because I have not the slightest idear.

For instance, I write to a friend in Poland often. When I was in the States, I never questioned how the letters arrived to her house when I had written the address in English. I just didn't.

Now, however, I am in Spain, and Spanish people don't really speak English all that well. I am still writing her address just as I knew how to write it back in the States, which means that it is addressed to someone in Krakow, Poland (not Cracovia, Polonia, as they call it in Spanish), and yet they still somehow arrive at her place without any problems.

I don't get this. Do all Spanish postal workers know how to read English? Do all Polish postal workers know English (or even Spanish for that matter. I'm sure there's someone in this country who has sent a letter to Poland and written the city name in Spanish)?

Is there a letter party somewhere? Do they al hook up and then travel with their letter companions to their new country?

Is there a big international mailing centre where all the letters of the world reunite and then go their happy, separate ways? Is there?

These are the things that I worry about when I have final projects to attend to.