Datteln

Datteln is a town in the district of Recklinghausen, in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany. It is situated on a crossroads of four canals (Datteln-Hamm Canal, Wesel-Datteln Canal, Dortmund-Ems Canal and Rhein-Herne Canal), which makes it the biggest canal junction in the World, approx. 10 km north-east of Recklinghausen and 20 km north-west of Dortmund.

Katja Seizinger, former alpine skier and triple Olympic gold medallist, was born in Datteln.

These two cards were sent to me by Frank and Uwe respectively.

Tintin

The Adventures of Tintin (Les Aventures de Tintin) is a series of comic albums created by Belgian cartoonist Georges Remi (1907–1983), who wrote under the pen name Hergé. The series was one of the most popular European comics of the 20th century, and it remains popular today. By the time of the centenary of Hergé's birth in 2007, Tintin had been published in more than 70 languages with sales of more than 200 million copies.

The series first appeared in French on 10 January 1929 in Le Petit Vingtième, a youth supplement to the Belgian newspaper Le Vingtième Siècle. The success of the series saw the serialised strips published in Belgium's leading newspaper Le Soir and spun into a successfulTintin magazine. In 1950, Hergé created Studios Hergé, which produced the canonical series of twenty-four Tintin albums. The Adventures of Tintin have been adapted for radio, television, theatre, and film.

The series is set during a largely realistic 20th century. Its hero is Tintin, a young Belgian reporter. He is aided by his faithful fox terrier dog Snowy (Milou in the original French edition). Later, popular additions to the cast included the brash and cynical Captain Haddock, the highly intelligent but hearing-impaired Professor Calculus, and other supporting characters such as the incompetent detectives Thomson and Thompson (French: Dupont et Dupond) and the opera diva Bianca Castafiore.

The series has been admired for its clean, expressive drawings in Hergé's signature ligne claire ("clear line") style. Its well-researched plots straddle a variety of genres: swashbuckling adventures with elements of fantasy, mysteries, political thrillers, and science fiction. The stories feature slapstick humour, offset by dashes of sophisticated satire and political or cultural commentary.

Felix sent me this nice card from Germany.

Polar Bears

Oleg sent me this lovely card. Bliss personified! - A Polar Bear mother and her cub sleeping on ice. 

Fehmarn – Germany's sunshine isle.

Silvia sent me this card featuring  Fehmarn – Germany's sunshine isle in the Baltic Sea.

With 2,200 hours of sun every year, endless stretches of natural beaches along 78 kilometres of coastline, picturesque freshwater lakes and rugged cliffs, Fehmarn is an idyllic holiday destination. Fehmarn might have been created especially for holidaymakers in search of a relaxing, healthy break. The Baltic Sea island, covering some 185 square kilometres, has a mild yet bracing climate and is one of the sunniest places in Germany. The FehMare pool complex, located on the island's south beach promenade, is a popular attraction with a large range of wellness and recreation facilities including seawater pools, relaxation pools and a variety of saunas.

Grimstad

Inger sent me this lovely card of Grimstad, a town and municipality in Aust-Agder county, Norway. It belongs to the geographical region of Sørlandet. The administrative center of the municipality is the town of Grimstad. Other notable places in Grimstad include Eide, Fevik, Fjære, Landvik, Prestegårdskogen, Reddal, and Roresanden.

It is a little maritime town set among many small islands (Skjærgård). There is a harbour, a long pedestrian shopping street, a small market square, a church, and a museum dedicated to the early life of Henrik Ibsen, who served as an apprentice to Grimstad’s local pharmacist Reimann, from 1844 to 1847, before leaving Grimstad in 1850. Ibsen's intimate knowledge of the local people and surroundings can be seen in his poem Terje Vigen.

Jena

Jena was founded quite late, compared to its near neighbour villages, in the early 2nd millennium. Part of the State of Thuringia from its foundation in 1920 on, it was incorporated into the German Democratic Republic in 1949 and its district of Gera in 1952. Since 1990, the city of Jena has been a part of the Free State of Thuringia which is itself part of the Federal Republic of Germany.

Jena has one of the biggest universities in Germany and its ratio of students to the total of inhabitants may belong to the greatest in Germany, as there are 20,000 students at the university which was founded in 1558 and named after Friedrich Schiller in 1934. Additionally, there are some 4,500 students at the university of applied sciences (Fachhochschule), making one out of four citizens of Jena a student.

Goethe and Schiller, probably the two greatest German writers, lived in Jena as well as for example the biologist Ernst Haeckel, the physicists Ernst Abbe and Erwin Schrödinger and the philosopher Karl Marx.

During most of the 20th century, Jena has been a world centre of optical industry around companies like CarlZeiss, Schott and Jenoptik (since 1990). As one of only few medium cities in Germany, it has some high-rise buildings in city centre, like Jen Tower. Those have their origin also in the former Carl Zeiss factory. Between 1790 and 1850, Jena was a focal point of German Vormärz as well as of studental liberal and unification movement and German Romanticism. Notable persons of this period in Jena are Friedrich Schiller, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Novalis and August Wilhelm Schlegel.

Jena lies in a hilly landscape in the east of Thuringia, within the wide valley of the Saale river.

The towers of Forstturm, Bismarcturm and Fuchsturm are shown on this card sent to me by Insa.

Alavus, a city of Finland

Sanna sent me this card with pictures of important sites in the village of Tuuri. This is a village in Alavus, a city of Finland.

Tuuri is located in the province of Western Finland and is part of the Etelä-Pohjanmaa region. The village has a population of 500. The name"Tuuri" originates in the old Finnish god of luck, harvest and success, Tuuri; he was the equivalent of Norse Thor and Estonian Taara.  

In Modern Finnish the appellative tuuri means luck.

The village is known for the second biggest department store in Finland, Veljekset Keskinen. The massive golden horseshoe erected over the shopping mall stands at number three in Reuters' list of world's ugliest buildings and monuments.