“Wind surfing on the Great Lakes is an ever increasingly popular sport enjoyed by young and old.” I don’t imagine that there’s too many days left this year for this activity, at least not on the Great Lakes; that water gets cold. This 1970s-era Plastichrome postcard arrived in my mailbox a few days ago; it’s 3.5″ x 5.5″, rather than the usual 4 x 6 inch cards that are popular today.

I had sent Jenna, my favorite Finnish Postcrosser, a postcard showing the observation tower atop Brasstown Bald, the highest point in Georgia, and received this in return, in yesterday’s mail.  After seeing the mountaintop tower (which needs no pillar to stand on in order to be above everything else), Jenna observed, “Your observation tower is a little bit different (from ours).”  Actually, even at first glance, I would say that it bears a striking resemblance to another American tower.  Here’s what Wikipedia has to say:

Näsinneula is an observation tower in Tampere, Finland, overseeing Lake Näsijärvi. It was built in 1970–1971 and was designed by Pekka Ilveskoski. It is the tallest free-standing structure in Finland and the tallest observation tower in the Nordic countries at a height of 168 metres. The tower opened in 1971 and is located in the Särkänniemi leisure centre. There is a revolving restaurant in the tower 124 metres above the ground. One revolution takes 45 minutes. The design of Näsinneula was inspired by the Space Needle in Seattle (emphasis added). The idea of a rotating restaurant was taken from the Puijo tower in Kuopio.

So Näsinneula was ours first.  Sorry, Jenna!

Also in yesterday’s mail was an actual greeting card, apparently sent in lieu of a postcard, from 12-year-old Arttu in Hämeenlinna:

Here’s a little something to cool you off on this hot summer’s Postcard Friendship Friday: “Iceberg Lake, Altitude 11,500 Ft., Trail Ridge Road between Estes Park and Grand Lake, Rocky Mountain National Park, Colorado.”  It was in fact posted from Estes Park, CO on 3 August 1940; I guess somebody else was trying to cool off, too.  But we’ll never know who.

This is a Curt Teich “C. T. Art-Colortone” linen postcard, number 6A-H288, published in 1936.  Odd that there’s no message, but it does happen from time to time.  I received a postcard myself just last week (Update: correction — two weeks ago — Ed.) with no message; I was very put out about it.

Be sure to check out the other blogs celebrating Postcard Friendship Friday.

It took me some time to decide which lake this is; there is no English-language caption on the card, and Winnie, who drew a very cute self-portrait on the back of the card, told me only that the picture “is a famous lake in Taiwan”, and even then only as a postscript.  On the other hand, it’s always nice to get a postcard on which the subject of the message is something besides the postcard itself.  As for the messages that I myself send out, I plead the fifth.

Ultimately, I was able to puzzle out the Chinese caption on the front of the card.  Sun Moon Lake  (日月潭) is named from the notion that  the lake’s east side is round like the Sun, while the west side is in the shape of a crescent moon.  It’s also the place to be in Taiwan if you’re on your honeymoon, much as Niagara Falls used to be the traditional destination for honeymooners in the US.

In the middle of the lake, between the sun and the moon, is Lalu Island, which is sacred ground to the Thao tribe (or Shao, depending on who you ask), who are a people aboriginal to Taiwan.  As a result, no non-tribesman are allowed on the island, nor is swimming allowed in the lake, except for a few special events.

Here’s an interesting card that Sean found whilst boondoggling in Oxford to research his latest tome. “Built in 1898 as a hospital ship, Chauncy Maples needs a complete refit to serve the people around Lake Malawi who have no access to health services.”

It’s an interesting ship, and an interesting endeavor: the vessel was built in Glasgow, shipped to Africa in over 3,000 pieces, hauled upriver by barge and overland by tribesmen, reassembled over the course of two years, then launched on Lake Malawi.  In the last hundred years Chauncy Maples has served as a missionary school, hospital ship, refuge from Arab slave traders, World War I gunboat, and troop carrier.

Now owned by the Government of Malawi and having sat idle and in disrepair for over a decade, she is being refitted for use as a hospital ship once again, mostly through donations.  Malawi needs all the health care improvement it can get; Malawians have a high rate of malaria, dysentery, and AIDS, and the life expectancy is only 36 years.  Eleven people out of every hundred die before the age of five. Chauncy Maples will serve thousands of villagers living on Lake Malawi.

You can read more about the project at the Chauncy Maples website. (Once you’ve done that, check out Sean’s new project Charge of the Write Brigade, a blog dedicated to fiction writing.)

This Tichnor Bros. postcard is literally like new, despite dating from about the mid-1940s. Here’s what the card has to say about Florida Southern College: “A four year accredited coeducational college established in 1885 and located in the heart of the citrus belt in beautiful central Florida. Students from 36 states and 14 countries study here in a year-round delightful climate.”

As one might guess from looking at the building, it was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. In fact, Wright designed his “Child of the Sun” campus and all of the buildings on it in 1939, and envisioned that construction would take about three years. Male students were admitted to the college with the understanding that their tuition would be paid in the form of construction labor. Unfortunately, World War II intervened, causing both a shortage of labor and an increase in the cost of building materials. However, the female students were able to complete many of the buildings while the men went off to war.

Since 1992, this building has served as the campus’s Visitor Center. Oddly enough, the college does not have a school of architecture.

Byron Harmon left Tacoma, Washington in 1903 to photograph mountains and, realizing that there were no photography studios in the Canadian Rockies, settled in Banff, Alberta. The surviving collection of photos numbers over 6,000.

On this card, barely visible near the bottom center, is the legend “Lake Louise. 118.”, scratched into the negative by the photographer. An identical real photo postcard with a more visible legend can be seen in Toni McLaughlin’s collection of Harmon RPPCs (look for #118). Toni also has images of a dozen white border postcards of Harmon’s published in the early 1920′s, the first of which is Lake Louise taken from an ever so slightly different angle.

The back of the card reads “Along the Line of the Canadian Pacific Railway. Photographed and Copyrighted by Byron Harmon, Banff, Canada.”