
The world's most romantic postbox - MiriamWeiner
http://www.bbc.com/travel/story/20180213-in-germany-the-worlds-most-romantic-postbox
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goldenkey
Incase you are in a rush and scanning for how it works: You send a letter to
the tree. It gets placed in the tree. Someone who is looking for a partner,
goes to the tree and picks out a letter. If they don't wish to reply, they
place it back in the tree.

I wonder what the oldest letter stuck in the tree is...? Would hate to have
mailed it from another city 20 years ago. Finally get the time to trek up
there, and find out it is still in the tree :-)

Happy Valentines day hackers!!

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n0tme
I doubt it will last more than one winter due to weather conditions.

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nsxwolf
I thought this was going to be about how you can mail your letter in a second
envelope to the postmaster in Romance, Arkansas and ask them to mail the
contents so that it gets postmarked from there.

You can also do this with Loving, New Mexico.

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efm
And in Loveland, Colorado.

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nashashmi
Is the expectation and posture different for people who are
brave/curious/willing to write/look to the tree for a relationship?

Do they behave differently and cause such positive outcomes?

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vog
Small nitpick: It is "Die Bräutigamseiche", not "Der Bräutigamseiche".

(That is, even though "Bräutigam" (bridegroom) is of course male, the last
word "Eiche" (oak) is female, so the composed word as a whole becomes female.
German grammar is strange sometimes, but in this case strict and consistent.)

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Tech-Noir
As with many small nitpicks, very interesting. Do I understand correctly that
"girl" is a similar thing, where it might naturally be expected to be female,
so _die_ Maedchen, but is actually _das_ (neuter) due to the -chen? And/or
that all -chen words would be _das_?

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lb1lf
Not a native German speaker, but yes - it is my understanding that any German
word ending in -chen is neuter.

(My guess: as the -chen ending is used to signify that it is a smaller version
of the stem of the word, this takes precedence over the gender of the stem -
and then some German at some point decided that such smaller items were
neuters and be done with it.)

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Vinnl
Same holds true in Dutch - although male and female words share the same
article ("de"), neuter words use a different one ("het"), diminutive words
(ending in -je) are always neuter, and we usually say "meisje" for girls.
Hence girl is neuter.

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lb1lf
Thank you! I was wondering whether I could use ‘diminutive’ or not in that
context.

I happen to be Norwegian, by the way - and Dutch happens to be quite
fascinating in that there are enough similarities with Norwegian and German
for me to be able to read Dutch well enough to understand what is going on -
I’d never read a novel in Dutch, but newspapers are fair game.

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Vinnl
To be fair, I'm not sure if I could either, so don't assume it is valid just
because I used it. I tried to look it up, but didn't get anything conclusive
about it within two minutes so I just assumed people would understand what I
meant.

It's really fascinating that you're able to understand Dutch newspapers
though! Despite knowing quite some German as well, Norwegian doesn't really
make a lot of sense to me. I can correctly guess some Swedish (which I seem to
recall is similar?) words when written down some of the time, but far from
often enough to be able to follow newspaper articles.

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jdmichal
It's definitely a diminutive form, along with _-lein_ , which operates the
same way regarding gender and umlaut.

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jacquesm
Brautigamseiche.com is still free, just think of the monetization potential.
/s

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norlys
You don't have to turn all cultural characteristics into money.

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xiconfjs
Fill a tree with trash...this have to be the true valentine gesture...

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wavefunction
We have some people in my city who put up tinsel on trees along a certain road
each year at Christmas. Of course they never come back to clean it up, so it
quickly becomes trash and litter on the edge of a preserve.

I've wondered if I could make a citizen's arrest for littering but knowing the
authoritarian state of the US police I'd likely be the one formally arrested.

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pc86
> I'd likely be the one formally arrested

If you spend your time going around trying to execute citizens' arrests, I
should hope so.

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wavefunction
It's a casual thought. I don't appreciate littering.

