Postcrossing Blog

Nothing melts our hearts like the happy combination of children and postcards. They might be young, but they can already appreciate the magic and awe behind these little pieces of paper!

When Audrey was born, her dad opened her an account on Postcrossing, so that she could receive postcards from all around the world. This was two years ago, and though she is still too young to read her postcards, she’s been enjoying Postcrossing in other, simpler ways.

Alan Yung (Audrey’s dad) shared these lovely photos with us:

Doesn’t she look sweet? Alan says Audrey is excited to pick up her postcards from their post box and can even recognize the origin of a few of the cards she receives by the stamps she’s familiar with! Many nice people send her cards with all sorts of cute characters and animals, and often cover the back with stickers and drawings.

Audrey also helps with the sending part of the process sometimes, by helping her dad drop the postcards in mailboxes all around town, which she learned to recognize! :)

Although Audrey doesn’t always understand the messages, Alan says that sometimes during bed time, she’ll ask for her pile of cards to go through the pictures again. Awwww… I must confess, I quite like the idea that all these postcrossers are helping put Audrey to sleep every night! :)

What about you? Did you ever share your postcards with your children or grandchildren? Leave a comment below – we’d love to hear about it!

In September 2012, Jeanette (aka TBJean) in Denmark and Rosita (aka rositahtc) in Hong Kong did a direct swap, each sending one postcard to each other. But life goes on, and after receiving their nice cards, both girls slowly forgot about each other.
Then, a year later, Jeanette moved to Hong Kong for a school exchange… guess what happened! :)

Here’s Jeanette with the story:

One day when I was living in Hong Kong, I left home later than usual to go to school, and got on the mini bus. Three girls from my school got on the bus as well, and took the three seats around me, one next to me and two in front. The two girls in the front pushed the girl next to me to start a conversation. Her name was Rosita, and we shared our contacts on a piece of paper.

After school that day, we were chatting online, and I randomly asked whether Rosita knew if I could buy a tube at the post office, for sending home posters. Rosita was passionately telling me about the post office, and that she had a postcard and stamp collection. Wanting to share mine with her, I sent her a picture of my wall back in Denmark, where all my postcards from all over the world were hanging, and she told that she liked posting postcards as well! We both realized that moment that we were both postcrossers :)

Suddenly, Rosita remembered that she had once received a postcard from Denmark, and decided that she had to send me a picture! When she found the postcard and turned it around, she noticed that the senders name was Jeanette, and then compared the writing to the note she had got earlier in the morning time…

Rosita immediately called me, and screamed into my ear: “Jeanette, do you live in a city called E-S-B-J-E-R-G?!”, to which I answered “Yeah, how do you know that?!”. She screamed again: “We exchanged postcards a year ago!!”

It was so surreal that we decided to have breakfast together the next day before our school’s sports day!

We still can’t believe what a huge coincidence it is, the fact that we met so randomly that morning on the mini bus! It is now more than 6 months later, and here we are, sitting in a restaurant, having a drink and deciding to share this story with our fellow postcrossers.

We say that it was meant to be, but of course it is up to you whether you want to believe in that.

Isn’t it a fantastic story? :D If you’ve also had an “happy accident” related to Postcrossing, we’d love to hear about it!

We often get emails from more enthusiastic postcrossers, asking why there aren’t more members in exotic locations – like South America or Africa! Well, we’d love to have more members in all the countries… but it turns out, a lot of the things we take for granted in some countries are not a given in many other places out there.

I was thinking about these issues the other day, when an email from Darío popped on our inbox. Darío (aka dariomartinezb) lives in the Dominican Republic, and he told us the story of how hard it is for people there to do Postcrossing… and how he managed to solve this problem in his town! It’s a really heartwarming story that I thought we should share with you. Here’s Darío:

The problem with Postcrossing in my country is that the Dominican postal service suffers from huge disadvantages: slow delivery times, frequent misplaced or lost mail, damages to mail delivered and so on. When users started to join, they had to wait over two months to get their first postcards after they got registered some of the sent ones. This disappointed many people and they complained at me for that.

Then I talked to my mailman (we became friends last year) and he explained some sad things. When the postal service receives a card for someone that never had received anything before, they waited until a second or third correspondence arrived and then deliver the bunch. Why? Many reasons: the mailman didn’t know the address, the place was too far away, or simply they didn’t consider a postcard to be that urgent. I tell you, that shocked me!

My mailman suggested that I rent a P. O. Box and shared with friends. The mail is delivered daily to P. O. Boxes and there are no restrictions on sharing the address. So, I decided to become myself a mailman to my friends. And now people are enjoying Postcrossing more than ever! A friend and I pick up the mail everyday and distribute to their owners.

This has been the only way to make this enjoyable to many people. Last year in January the Dominican Republic was stuck in the early DO-200… We are now approaching DO-1000! I know that’s not much, but we are just getting started! :)

Isn’t that fantastic? Hurray for Darío (left) and Ramón (right), on their way to deliver today’s batch of postcards! :)

Every time we receive one of your lovely friendship stories, we get a huge smile and can’t help but marvel at the power of simple postcards! On today’s post, Nathalie (aka TotosDawn) from the Netherlands tells us how postcards inspired her to travel – and meet her postcard-pals on the other side of the Atlantic!

When I started sending postcards via Postcrossing I never thought that actual friendships could grow and that the people behind the postcards could mean the world to me! But it happened!

On December 22nd 2010 I became a member of Postcrossing. I had heard a lot about the site, and got excited from the first minute I got my first address. I send out 5 postcards and waited behind my computer to see if they already arrived. Finally they started to arrive and I received my first card back!! The person sending this card is JulianChristopher. He sent me a beautiful card of the Sequoia National Park in California. I immediately fell in love with not only sending postcards, but also I wanted to go there because it looked amazing!

Besides sending the official postcards I started to send more and more private swaps and adding postcards to my favorites. Many cards from Blkbird were (and still are!) in my favorite gallery. She send me a message to ask if we could do a private swap! Of course!! It was difficult for me to choose which one of the beautiful cards of my favorites I wanted… One day, a big surprise was waiting for me when I found the private swap in my mailbox: it was an envelope filled with all the cards I added to my favorites send by her! I was amazed to see how sweet someone completely strange to me could be! We started talking and I fell in love again with the beautiful landscapes on the postcards: Colorado!

If before America had never crossed my mind as a holiday destination, now I was checking hotels, flight tickets, rental cars… My love for America only grew the more postcards I got, but it also became more specific. Sequoia National Park, the first card I got, was still in my head and I wanted to see more it. And who better to ask about it than the person who send me my first card? He was so sweet and sent me some more cards and then one thing led to another and we became 'postcard-pals’ and sometimes we spoke on Facebook. I didn’t forget about Colorado either, neither about Blkbird. We kept sending postcards and I fell in love more and more with America.

So when my husband proposed, we didn’t need to think about a honeymoon destination: AMERICA! We planned a roadtrip, crossing all the places I saw on the postcards I loved. But one thing I really wanted to do to was to meet the people who were so sweet to me all this time and had become my friends. I wasn’t sure if they would like to meet me too, I mean, I’m a stranger from another country, who they only knew via Facebook and postcards. But both were really enthusiastic about my plans and we planned the meetings.

First it was JulianChristopher's turn. We planned to see each other in the Sequoia National Park, where else! From the first moment we met I felt so happy and blessed that I had the chance to meet him and his sweet son. I just couldn’t believe that it was real, that it wasn’t a dream. We spend hours hiking and chatting. He could tell us so much about Sequoia, America and so much more. How special to spend time together in the park he showed me for the first time on a postcard as a total stranger!! Time flies and when the moment of saying goodbye came closer I didn’t wanted to say goodbye and felt sad. But no tears when we said goodbye, only a big smile of gratefulness that I could experience this and actually meet the 'stranger-friend from America’.

Meeting Blkbird was just as special as meeting JulianChristopher. Last minute we decided to have dinner the night before we had planned to spend together. We were waiting at the restaurant and she was a bit late, so I was nervous that she wouldn’t come or that she saw us waiting and thought: NO WAY! Nothing of that was true and when we met it was like meeting an old friend after years. No uncomfortable feelings, just chatting, eating, laughing. The restaurant was closing so we needed to go unfortunately but I was more then happy to know that we would meet again the next day.

We planned to go to the Red Rocks Amphitheater in Denver and the Dushanbe teahouse in Boulder. We enjoyed her 'guided tour’ and company. It was unbelievable how much we had in common. She could have been my mother or sister or twin. She is so alike me that it almost is scary!! No surprise that we didn’t want to say goodbye, so we sat for hours in the car when we got 'kicked out’ of the teahouse. Just talking and enjoying the company. No wonder that when it was REALLY time to say goodbye we both cried. When we drove away, I felt so sad.

JulianChristopher and Blkbird both have a special place in my heart. For them I would return to America without a doubt. When I’m writing this, tears are falling down my cheeks. Tears of sadness that I know that I won’t see them for a long time, tears of happiness, that I had the privilege to meet them.

Who could have thought that sending postcards could actually lead to lifelong friendships!

Some time ago, we stumbled on katilemur's profile and were intrigued by a request which read “draw, please, the Dachshund – is a short-legged, long-bodied dog. It’s easy for drawing, really!”.

We wondered… did she receive a lot of drawn dachshunds on her postcards? Turns out… yes, she did!

From the top-left corner (with permission), drawings by zheka-french, Anja71, flooranna, Lord5005, cami21901, katkarapusalaatti, Bookorama, Ella_Grape and julykachanova.

A lot of drawers seem a bit reserved about their drawing skills, but they still gave it a go! How cool is that? :D

We were curious so we asked Ekaterina… why dachshunds?

“Once I wanted to get something more interesting than just ”greetings from… happy postcrossing". I thought how to encourage people to do little more than they used to. And I’ve decide the simple drawing is what I need. So remained only to choose a theme. It had to be something simple, have the typical features and everyone should know it and the result must be funny… I guess it’s very easy to draw the dachshund for anyone, even if you don’t know how to draw: long body with short legs! I’ve got the dachshund and I like this breed. So my choice was predetermined =)"

Drawing by BenjaminYuxin.

Great work, everyone! :) You can see more lovely dachshunds on katilemur's collection here.