Snail Mail

It’s official: Spain has the slowest mail in the world. I knew it was slow—a birthday gift sent to me by a friend took almost two months to arrive—but slowness has now been taken to a new level.

Yesterday, Andrew went to campus to clean out his mailbox one final time, and he found a letter—a letter I’d been waiting for since last September. It was an ATM card that had been sent to PA to replace my expiring ATM card, and which my father had mailed along to me here. Not receiving that card was a huge fiasco, requiring many phone calls to Citibank to have a new card issued, as I was on my way someplace—Amsterdam? Marrakech?—and really needed to have access to cash.

That story’s long over. But it seems the little letter was still, all this time, making its snail-slow path across continents—or simply sitting in a bin in a Spanish mailroom. Something tells me it had lots of company.

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