Sunday, August 03, 2014

More requests from abroad: "I would like to ask you to send me some beer items."

(The first instance of my overt voyeurism is here)

If you own a brewery or work for one, you probably know the drill.

E-mails constantly arrive from overseas (oddly, with the exception of Nigeria), asking you to send beer labels, crown caps and the like to become the cherished keepsakes of private collectors who've heard of your beer, even in far-off Warsaw or the Amazon Basin.

No SASE, no service; still, there's something that haunts me about the foreign requests, which tend to come from Central/Eastern European locales, these being places of longtime personal interest to me historically and geographically. Lately, I've been pasting their addresses into Google Map and seeing what their places of residence look like. For some reason, I find it a melancholy exercise, and I'm unsure why. My best guess is transferral. Here are the most recent ones.

First, Vlad from Russia. He lives in Novocherkassk, near Rostov-on-Don, near the Sea of Azov. The city is only a few years older than New Albany.


Pavel also lives in Russia. His home in the Moskovsky district of St. Petersburg is well removed from the city center, but the subway runs relatively nearby. It's a typical apartment house, but at least it appears leafy.


I hope no protocols are being violated by my depicting their buildings, seeing as there's a drone hovering outside my front door even as I type. I just can't help wondering: What's the rest of the story?

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