Thank you for such lovely comments @macoolette! It's been soooooo long ago neither my sisters nor I remember where we got our details from. All I remember is that I had a form to state my first, second and third preference of where I would like my pen pal from and I think shortly after that we just received a short description of the person- Name, age and where from and that's how it all began. It's a shame there isn't anything like that now but in England, some teachers try to hook up with schools from other countries to encourage pen friendship but I'm not sure if they are successful in doing that.