Robot Claw

I received two other interestingly-stamped postcards recently, but didn’t include them in yesterday’s post since they weren’t from Postcrossing.

The first was this:

Adam sent me this recently and as you can see it’s got all five of the recent Australian disaster relief stamps on it. And what stamps they are! Australia rarely issues shaped stamps and as best I know these are the only ever Australia-shaped ones. Here’s detail of the best one (and yes I agree with Adam):

Happily the card arrived intact and the stamps are in near perfect condition 🙂

The other card I recently received was from Korea and featured these beautiful lunar new year stamps:

Look how cute they are! Both of them feature dazzling foil effects and they sparkle in the light! I was impressed by both the Australian and American year of the rat stamps but these Korean ones top both! Thanks to Jessica and her dad for sending me these!

Incidentally South Korea prints a lot of very pretty stamps and I always hope to get a card from there via Postcrossing but so far I haven’t been lucky enough. Maybe I’ll need to visit one day and send myself some…

I’ve now been a member of Postcrossing for 15 months and I’m still loving it. I’ve sent 185 cards and received about 175. I can send up to thirteen at a time now, and every weekend dutifully write and send about five on average. Here’s the stats:

And the map (red is sent, blue received):

As you can see I’ve now received cards from Africa, but not yet Australia or South America. Or Antarctica, but I’m not holding my breath for that since there’s only one user (at a Dutch base).

The vast majority of cards I’ve received are standard tourist cards or cards featuring animals. But there’s also been a wonderful assortment of weird and wonderfully strange cards including some vintage ones. I’ve also now got two like these:

Each had lots of messages and signatures on the back. I think people get these at ‘meetups’ and the attendees sign every card in advance to be used in the future. Both of mine are from different Russian meetups. (Incidentally Postcrossing is very popular in Russia and the country even printed an official Postcrossing stamp!)

Here’s an unusual arrival:

The card was ruined! It had gotten wet, torn, folded and mangled in transit. I could barely read the message on the back! I’m astonished it made it!

As for the backs, some people write very little, some write about what they did that day, some write about their hobbies or family or their dreams. It’s always fun to see what they say. And then every now and then truly unique ones arrive like this:

Or this:

Yes, that’s a wax seal!

And of course I’m still loving the stamps. Postcrossers go out of their way to make the stamps interesting and they rarely disappoint:

These days the messages on the cards almost all reference the virus and it drives home that no matter where we live or what our situation our lives are all being profoundly affected. It’s also interesting to note the now common ‘stay safe’ phrase is being used by people all over the world and has become the standard sign off for most cards.

One (of many!) consequences of the virus is the availability of postcards. Luckily I restocked when we went to the Pez museum a few weeks back but of isolation continues for months I’ll certainly run out of cards to send. In anticipation of this I recently bought 200 high- quality cards on Amazon but I won’t tell you what they are since you may receive one yourself 🙂

It’s good to see this service continuing even through a pandemic. More than ever in this era of social isolation it’s nice to have some contact even with people I’ll never actually meet.