A Letter With A Hand-Drawn Map In Place Of A Mailing Address Was Actually Delivered

Reddit/awanderingvagrant

Let’s give the post office a little credit here. They get a lot of abuse to be sure, but someone needs to step up and commend them when they do the job right, and that time is now. (For the Iceland post office, anyway.) It seems a tourist had to mail a letter to a little place in northwest Iceland called Búðardalur, home to at least 270 hardy souls.

Problem? The sender didn’t have an address for the receiver, though he had the following description: “Horse farm with an Icelandic/Danish couple and three kids and a lot of sheep!” and “The Danish woman who works in a supermarket.” In addition to providing those details, the sender just drew a map.

Incredibly, the piece of mail was successfully delivered.

In lieu of an address, a tourist to Iceland drew this map of Búðardalur and surroundings on an envelope. The postal service was successful in delivering it! [720×481] from MapPorn

This site (after a Google Chrome translation) says the recipient of the wayward post is one Rebecca Cathrine Kaadu Ostenfeld and goes on to add (don’t mind the broken English, it’s the best Chrome could do):

The envelope was mailed in Reykjavik foreign tourists were not quite sure that it would pass and were said that this inscription on the envelope would be to prove that Iceland was the coolest country on the earth and that anything was possible in Iceland. And thus it is confirmed, everything is possible in Iceland, at least to bring postcards to deliver a hand drawn map position, as shown in the graph.

“This was my friend writing me,” Ostenfeld explained in a Facebook chat with Simplemost. “His name is Michel, and he is from France, and also two of my other friends was [sic] writing this letter to me. Maybe they know my address but they didn’t use it, because they wanted to show how amazing Iceland is, and that everything is possible here.”

iceland letter delivered with map recipient
Rebecca Cathrine Kaadu Ostenfeld

The craziest part? This isn’t the first letter that’s been delivered to Ostenfeld with little more than a map to get it there. Ostenfeld told us that she also recently received a letter addressed with a map from a Russian friend who lives in Moscow.

“I’m so overwhelmed of all this attention,” Ostenfeld, who runs a “minizoo” on the farm where she and her family live, said. “And I love that this letter is giving people all over the world a smile on there lips as this letter did when i got it.”

One person on Reddit who says he’s met Ostenfeld isn’t surprised either that the letter got there.

That’s funny, I’m positive I met that woman at the supermarket when I visited Iceland in September! I remember her being a bit more outgoing than most Icelandic people, although they were all really warm and welcoming. She told me about how she moved to Iceland from Denmark around 10 years ago to raise sheep and live a quiet rural lifestyle. It isn’t too surprising that the letter was delivered considering how small Búðardalur is and how few Danes there are in Iceland.

So there you have it. What a story, huh?

[h/t Hello Giggles]

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About the Author
Brinke Guthrie
Brinke has worked in Cincinnati and San Francisco radio. He also writes for TennisIdentity.com and Uni Watch.com. He was editor/writer for CuteOverload.com. He and his wife live in the SF Bay Area.

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