Postcrossing Blog

Reto (aka Acclax) from Switzerland went on a “once-in-a-lifetime” trip in February to a very special place, and wrote back with a report of his adventures. We’re always happy to hear about the special places postcrossers explore and send postcards from in Travel Mode, and Reto’s postcards from the southern tip of the world have started arriving to their destinations today, so this seems like a good occasion to publish this blog post. Enjoy!

I had the opportunity to travel to the island of South Georgia this February. This island lies around 55° S and 36° W in the middle of the Southern Atlantic Ocean. It’s biggest “village”, Grytviken, is home of the most southern post office of Great Britain, with an official letter box and daily emptying hours. With only three permanent inhabitants in summer (and none in winter), it’s a very popular stop for ships visiting Antarctica.

Together with Postcrossing, I was able to post the first 20 official postcrossing cards with a GS-code to people scattered all over the world. Even though I posted them on March 3rd, they are still on their long journey to its recipients.

Grytviken once was a Norwegian, later English whaler station. The whalers used every part of the whales: the blubber and meat were rendered to extract the oil, and the bones and meat were turned into fertilizer. Elephant seals were also hunted for their blubber. Around 300 men worked at the station during its heyday, operating during the southern summer from October to March.

You can still see the ruins of the big tanks, working facilities together with some old houses, barracks and a little church. There is also a very interesting museum where you learn a lot about the history of Grytviken and South Georgia. Next to the village is a cemetery where you can visit Sir Ernest Shackleton's grave. In 1914, Shackeleton planned to cross the Antarctic continent, but the Endurance, his ship, was broken by ice in the Weddell Sea in November 1915. To save his men, Shackleton and five of his men went back to South Georgia to get help. Believe it or not, all 28 members of this expedition survived. During my trip, the wreck Endurance was discovered on March 9th on the ground of the Weddell Sea.

Between the ruins you find fur seals in abundance, they are everywhere, the young ones very curious and extremely close. You also find sea elephants in Grytviken and king penguins.

And of course, there is the post office where I posted twenty cards with the code GS-1 to GS-20. When I asked at the post office, how long it takes to send these cards, I was told, that it could take “some weeks” to be picked up. Hopefully, these cards will have been shipped to the Falkland Islands by now. From there, they are brought to London. From there, they are being distributed to all over the world.

So, if one of you reading this receives a card with the code GS-1 to GS-20, you can be sure that your card had experienced a long, special journey!

PS: Planning to visit a special post office or mailbox? We’d love to hear about it!

The writing prompts invite postcrossers to write about a different topic on their postcards’ messages every month. These are just suggestions though — if you already know what you want to write about, or the recipient gives you some pointers, that’s great too!

This month, we chose one of Eva (aka lauranalanthalasa)'s prompts to spark conversations on postcards, which goes nicely with February’s theme of writing about comfort food. Eva suggested people talk about what they do for self-care or to treat themselves. It’s always important to do that when you can!

As usual, I’ll go first! For me, it depends on my mood. If I’ve just been stressed out and I need to wind down, then I’ll grab a book and either cuddle up in bed under my weighted blanket, or run a nice hot bath with some nice bubbles or a bath bomb. I have some favourite series which I reread when I really need a pick-me-up: I’ve talked about my love for Dorothy L. Sayers on the blog before, for instance!

Sometimes I need something a bit more active, though. Going for walks is nice, especially if I can get out somewhere where there are trees, streams, and birds/animals running around! The picture in this post is from a walk I went on earlier this month: it’s a little wintery, but I saw some squirrels and a pair of robins. It’s always nice to get moving, and to watch other little lives going on around you.

So how about you? Do you have special little rituals when you’re upset, or little routines you use to help you unwind? Feel free to share them with us here, and use this as a prompt for what to write on your postcards this month!

It’s now been almost two weeks since the recent Russian invasion of Ukraine started, and the sadness and worry that we feel has only increased. Every day since, we’ve replied to dozens of your messages, filled with just as much concern as our own for the people living through this nightmare.

We’ve written about this on the monthly stats emails last week and also on the forum, but we realize our message might not have reached everyone, or been clear enough. So let us be 100% clear: we strongly condemn this war, and are against any wars. Every human life is precious, so every single life lost to a war is a tragedy, not to speak of all the destruction and suffering. What is happening in Ukraine is heartbreaking, and we hope the thousands of postcrossers there and their loved ones are all safe.

Some of you have been asking Postcrossing to block postcrossers in Russia and Belarus, as a way to protest the war. We understand the feeling of helplessness and the will to do something. But the same way we believe people of all ages, genders, religions or other beliefs have a place in Postcrossing, we don’t think people’s nationality or what their governments are doing should be used as a reason for excluding them from the project. Postcrossing is about regular people, and not their governments, politicians or generals. If you feel strongly that you do not want to send postcards to postcrossers in a certain country, we respect that — but in that case, please don’t request any addresses on the website for now.

It is precisely during the hard times that connection and communication are needed the most, that they are the most precious. Platforms for intercultural dialogue are valuable tools to help bring more understanding, empathy and peace to the world, and we believe this to be an important part of Postcrossing’s mission.

In the past 16.5 years, Postcrossing has been about connecting the world without any discrimination. Postcrossers everywhere are people just like us. Parents and children. Supermarket cashiers and medical staff. Scientists, train drivers, students, birdwatchers, cooks, mail carriers… all human. With every postcard we send, we help create more awareness about our world and make tiny steps towards a more humane and sustainable future, even when all we do is ramble about our breakfast, or complain about the gloomy weather.

Many of you have been reaching out also to ask whether it is still possible to send mail to these countries. This information is in the Postal Monitor and we’re doing our best to keep it up to date, so that we don’t select addresses in countries where you cannot send postcards to at the moment. If the information on the Postal Monitor is not current, you can help by reporting news from your postal operator here.

As we are writing this, two million people have already fled Ukraine in search of safety, and millions more are suffering and fearing for their lives, including postcrossers. We’re thinking of them, and have donated all of our February AdSense revenue (from the Google Ads you see on the website) to the UN Refugee Agency and to UNICEF who are both on the ground helping those affected. We hope you will consider joining us in supporting these or other organizations that are offering humanitarian help, in whichever way or amount you can.

We stand with all those calling for peace, and hope peace can return to Ukraine very soon.

Time to wrap up this edition of our Cards for Literacy campaign with Deutsche Post, and finally reveal the results from 2021. It was a great year for the campaign, so let’s just jump straight into it:

Once more, a record shattering campaign, and an amazing performance by all our German members! We’re so, so proud of you — what a brilliant effort and result. And naturally, even if you’re not in Germany, if you received some postcards from there in the past few months, then it’s likely that you too have taken part in this campaign and contributed to this achievement — well done!

Our heartfelt thank you to Deutsche Post as well, for renewing this collaboration and supporting this good cause. We’re sure their support to Stiftung Lesen’s and their literacy efforts are going to improve many people’s lives.

So, all that is left to do now is for Paulo to run his script to choose the winners of this year’s prizes. If you’re in Germany and participated in this campaign in December, keep an eye on your email — you might be the lucky winner of a voucher to make some custom stamps, or one of their cool footballs.

Eager for more statistics? Here we go, for part 2 of the census analysis! There’s actually only a couple of things left we’d like to go over in this post, so let’s dive straight into it.

First up, let’s talk about blog content — what are postcrossers’ favorite topics to read about here?

This was a multiple choice question, and of the people who replied, most like to read about postal history and interesting postal facts… which is great, because so do we! 😊 Statistics and friendship stories are also popular, with the rest of the choices being a little more evenly distributed. There’s definitely something for everyone! This blog is actually a part of the website we’re rather proud of, as there has been an average of one post per week here for the last 14 years, if you can believe it! Looking back at the long archive of posts is really gratifying.

Moving on to the big questions… what do people like or dislike the most about Postcrossing? Let’s look at the things that annoy us all first:

Keep in mind that this was a multiple answer question, so people could pick up to 3 replies or write a different one. This was an open question in the previous census, so the answers were a bit all over the place… 😅 We tried to condense the main replies we saw, so we could get a better idea of their distribution.

Clearly, expired or lost postcards are a big source of frustration with this hobby, as no one likes to send a postcard that ends up not being acknowledged. Over the years, the Postcrossing system has been improved to include several automated rules and triggers focused on reducing this issue, including setting accounts to inactive, sending reminders, and blocking or closing accounts. Because of these automations, the percentage of postcards that goes unregistered has been steadily decreasing over the years (*), and we’ll continue to do our best to further minimize it. We know that this percentage will never be zero, but we still have a few different ideas that we’re planning to test throughout the year that will hopefully further lower these numbers.

Other annoying things include the lack of geographical diversity, demanding profiles and the fact that the website isn’t very mobile-friendly yet… all things we’ve been addressing and tweaking in different ways, and which continue to be on the top of on our long to-do list. Beyond these big ones, some postcrossers also remarked on empty registration messages, postcards with short messages, empty profiles or those written in languages other than English, or receiving too many postcards at once, among other issues. We think these are fair grievances, and having a clear ranking of their “annoyingness level” helps us prioritize how we tackle them.

And, last but not least, what do people like best about Postcrossing?

We purposely didn’t include sending and receiving postcards as an option, as we assume everyone likes those parts (and there was a separate question about that). Beside those, contacting with people all over the world seems to be the #1 thing members like about Postcrossing, but its a tight margin separating that answer from others like the surprise and randomness, learning about other countries and cultures, or being able to make others happy. Less people highlight being part of a community or the creative aspect of the hobby, which we definitely understand, as those are not for everyone.

And that’s a wrap on this year’s census analysis! We haven’t yet finished going through all the feedback on the last question of the census, in which we asked you to give us ideas of things to improve or just share your thoughts about Postcrossing — the number of comments is a bit overwhelming, in a very nice way. 😊 A big thank you to all of you who took the time to fill out the census, for your kind words and for the many ideas of things to improve and think about!

(*) There are two notable hiccups in the expiration rates lowering trend over the years, which we monitor closely as we know these are important to Postcrossing. Mid-2017, Russian Post had an issue that caused lots of mail to be stuck somewhere for a few months, causing the postcards to expire before being delivered later in the year. Also, in the beginning of the pandemic in 2020, when flights started being cancelled and there were no alternative routes in place, a lot of mail got stuck for a long time. Both these incidents have been resolved (through improvements to the mail service, and with the help of the Postal Monitor), and the overall trend continues to slope downwards, towards a lower expiration rate.