Yesterday I received my 500th Postcrossing card from Anastajia in Russia:
Reminds you of a certain film doesn’t it?
It was six months ago I passed 150 cards so I’ve been receiving them at the rate of about 25 a month. Since the last update I’ve received cards from 7 additional countries, to a total to 49:
There’s still a long way to go though: there’s users from 206 countries on Postcrossing! Looking at the above chart the average travel times have gone up by a few days compared to six months ago, no doubt due to the pandemic. And as usual it takes about a week longer for me to receive cards than for those I sent them to to get them.
The cards are as weird and varied as ever, helped no doubt by me saying in my profile that I like weird cards! Here’s a couple of notables from this last six months:
That’s a card from Belarus and as you can see the sender matched the stamp to the card. This is the third time this has happened and I’m always impressed since it couldn’t be easy!
That’s an old advertising card I received from Germany. The card is clearly very old (it’s heavily yellowed on the reverse) and a quick google search showed the program it advertises screened in the early 1950s. Could this be a 70 year old card?!?
As always I love the stamps, and the majority of users seem to as well since most put effort into using pretty or unusual examples.
I received a card from Guernsey (a small not-country in the English Channel) which is one of the smallest regions in the world to have its own postal service. While the queens portrait gives a hint as to the connection with Royal Mail, I’ve always been intrigued by these small independent island that have their own mail and it was a treat to get this card.
Look at this gigantic Indonesian stamp! I’ve got some massive stamps from Russia but I think this must be the new record for big stamps!
And then there’s this from a sender in Austria. The stamp and surround perfectly fit into the envelope into which he put the postcard. He mentioned he was an avid stamp collector but he is now aging and is giving away his collection. Amazingly he also included a United Nations first day cover in the envelope:
I’ve never sent a card back to a sender (that’s not how Postcrossing works) but I made an exception in this case and sent him one plastered with a variety of retro stamps.
At 500 received (and 502 sent) I’m now well above the average for US users (which is about 100 cards) but well, well below the top ranks, which is over 14,000 cards for a US user and more than an absurd 33,000 cards for any user (in this case, a German). In fact this German guy has sent an average of 7 cards a day since he signed up about 13 years ago. Imagine the time and cost!
So my next target would be 1000 cards, which at this rate should be in about July 2023. I’ll update when it happens and we’ll see how close my prediction was 🙂
