Beautiful sunset shot of Edinburgh, Scotland
Thank you to Yahoo! Mail for sponsoring this post about staying connected. I was selected for this sponsorship by the Clever Girls Collective, which endorses Blog With Integrity, as I do.
With this campaign, I was tasked to write two posts about email having great significance in my life. For my first post about Yahoo! Mail, I wrote about how I did NOT marry the man who set up my email. It was my first introduction to email. For my second post, another college moment came into my memory almost immediately.
Because today we have so many vices and ways to get in touch with people – cell phones, texting, Twitter, Facebook, etc. I feel like it’s dimmed the significance of a regular old email. But back when I was in college, when email was first going mainstream, it was momentous. And there was nothing better than getting a nice long email from a friend at another school or a pen pal from abroad.
I studied abroad the spring semester of my junior year in Edinburgh, Scotland. The city was beautiful and I made some wonderful friends but I was also often homesick for my boyfriend, family and friends back home. Email was my saving grace.
Since there wasn’t WiFi back then, I’d head to the computer lab each morning before class. I’d spend an hour or two emailing back and forth with friends. My Mom would wake up early back home in Philly and she and I would email back and forth, having conversations while I was sitting there. (Again, no cell phones, people. If I wanted to call home I had to use the pay phone down the hall in my dorm room.)
Having email from abroad kept me grounded. I was able to go out and experience everything Edinburgh had to offer knowing that each day I had that little bit of home in my inbox to send me love and keep in touch.
Here’s a cute little video about Yahoo! Mail:
awwwh. I do remember those mornings-it was exciting to get ‘instant’ messages from you in Scotland, or as Dad says: from ‘across the pond’.
Of course instant in those days was to send an email, go upstairs(the computer, remember, was in the basment), make the coffee, head back down and hopefully in the 7 or so minutes that had elapsed, an email was back. LOL.
Progress and technology. How far we have come- what would Alexander Graham Bell think today. . . . .