Category: Postcards

Postcrossing Update

May 28, 2019

I’ve been using Postcrossing for five months now, and have sent and received just under 50 cards. Every time I find a new card in my PO Box it brings a smile to my face, and I’m enjoying the service even more than I thought I would.

I’ve received cards from 25 countries, although a third came from only three of them (Germany, Russia and China). I’ve sent cards to Australia and South America but not received any from either. I’ve neither sent nor received cards to Africa.

The cards themselves run the gamut from typical scenic shots to art, animals, seasonal or pop culture. Sometimes people don’t write much at all, sometimes they write a lot. Occasionally even the simplest messages bring a smile:

Most users are older women, but I did get a card from a child (complete with art!):

Some users are so experienced they have massively streamlined their work via stamps or stickers. Here’s an extreme example of a card featuring only printed stickers and no actual writing:

The variety of stamps is astonishing. Most users seem as interested in the stamps as the card themselves and take the extra effort to use interesting postage. I particularly like the unusually-shaped stamps that often come from EU countries.

Here’s an example of a card from Malaysia that included the non-postage parts from the stamp sheet. They are so big there wasn’t much space for anything else:

So of almost fifty cards which is my favorite? That’s a difficult question but I sat down and had a look and arrived at this one from Moscow:

It’s tiny – like a normal card cut in half! – and is styled to look like a Polaroid. I’ve never seen a card like this so it gets extra points for originality. Given how many I get from Russia I wonder how long before I get another tiny card?

(Of course the very best card in these five months is one I sent myself on which I drew an astonishing Freddy Mercury since the recipient mentioned she was a Queen superfan. She hasn’t received it yet…)

If you’re reading this and wondering when you’ll next have the fun of a postcard in your very own mailbox then the future looks bright! In only two days we’re off on a vacation, and you can look forward to my usual postcards in your mailbox very soon 🙂

Postcrossing

March 9, 2019

Recently I became a member of Postcrossing, a community of deltiologists that send and receive postcards to each other. It’s extremely simple: you’re given a random address to send a card to, and when it arrives another stranger will get your address and send you a card.

Each card is assigned a code, and when it arrives I enter the code to verify receipt. It’s a simple and effective system.

At first you can only send/receive five at a time but this increases with use. I’m up to seven now. While you don’t have any control over the recipients, you can elect to exclude your country which I have.

At first I wondered if it was weird to send cards to strangers but it’s not at all. I can write about anything and I do, but I often include mundanities such as the weather or what I just ate! Here’s a message that was written to me:

It’s fun seeing people’s preferences (one woman today liked cards featuring buckets, another requested no cards with toucans on them!) and trying to pick cards they like. Mostly though I’ve been sending Albany cards.

Of course another nice aspect of getting cards from all over the world are the stamps! In my profile I’ve requested animal/nature stamps and already people seem to have obliged.

I’ve been doing this only two months and have received fifteen cards. Living in the USA is a disadvantage since it quickly became apparent how slow our mail is. Postcrossing tracks all sorts of statistics that show, for instance, that it takes about 8 days for a card I send to arrive in Germany but 16 days for theirs to arrive here.

Although I’m still relatively new to the service I’m loving it so far. Some users have sent/received thousands of cards! Whether I ever get to that stage who knows, but for now I’m just happy whenever a new card arrives from distant shores 🙂