Postcrossing Blog

After traveling around the world, the Little Mail Carriers just wanted a bit of a rest… They found the perfect place for it in Dinant, an idyllic city in Belgium gracefully posed on the margins of the Meuse.

Jo (aka juytters) was their host on this trip, and welcomed them with arms wide open! Here’s their report:

Salut everyone! Welcome to Dinant!

This charming Walloon city of around 14,000 inhabitants is squeezed between the Meuse river and the steep cliffs above it. Dinant’s impressive and strategic positioning along the narrow shore exposed it to a lot of battles and tragedies throughout the centuries.

But Dinant’s claim to fame is a happy one, something that brings joy to a lot of music lovers worldwide! Doesn’t ring a bell? Think Kenny G…

… no, not the man himself, but the saxophone he plays, which was invented by Dinant’s most famous citizen: Adolphe Sax! Mr. Sax was born in Dinant in 1814 and followed in the footsteps of his father as an instrument designer, making several improvements to the clarinet before finally inventing the saxophone in 1840.

The city is proud of its heritage and decorated the Charles de Gaulle bridge across the Meuse in colorful saxophones – one for each country in the EU. We zoomed past them in direction of another of Dinant’s highlights: the church of Notre-Dame of Dinant.

The original church was destroyed in 1227 when a big chunk of cliff fell down on it, and again in 1914 during the Battle of Dinant. But the resilient people of the city rebuilt the church to its former glory, using local limestone. Perched high on the cliff in the background, you can see the impressive Citadel fortress, overlooking the city.

A few days later, we got invited to a Postcrossing meetup in Gent, how exciting! We toured the town, bought lots of postcards and met some very nice postcrossers!

That was really lovely! But a trip to Belgium would not be complete without a detour to Brussels… so stay tuned for the next episode, we’ll tell you all about that! :)

À bientôt!

A big thank you to Jo for hosting the little guys and showing them around! Come back in a few days for the second part of the Little Mail Carrier’s adventures in Belgium! :)

Back in May, we introduced you to “We Are One”, a project which brought Postcrossing closer to the children of Tuvalu. The project is now close to its end, and Emily sent us an update filled with really nice photos… we just had to share them with you!

She sums it up:

This project has been an amazing journey for me and the students. Not only were they excited to write on nicely printed postcards of Tuvalu (which is rare or never seen) and introduce it to the world, they were also thrilled to receive postcards, read the kind words from postcrossers and be amazed at the beautiful scenery pictures on a card. It is their fist time ever to learn how to read a map and name the seven continents!

My greatest satisfaction, as a teacher, is to see their thirst for knowledge, wanting to learn more about this world where most countries are too far away to them.

Sounds fantastic, doesn’t it? But a picture is worth a thousand words, so here they are:

Happy children and postcards… guaranteed to make my heart melt!

Emily collected some feedback about the project from the children, and one of them wrote “It’s amazing and I hope that other schools around the world do a similar project”. We hope so too! :)

A huge thank you to Emily for setting up this year’s activity in Tuvalu – and to Taiwan ICDF (International Cooperation and Development Fund) as well, for sending her there and helping fund her postcard project!

One postcard… two postcards… 25 million postcards! Boy, that escalated quickly^*!

We did a little math – did you know that if we lined 25 million postcards side by side, they would be enough to cover the distance between Lisbon and St. Petersburg, or between Los Angeles and Washington DC? That’s how many postcards we’ve all sent these past 9 years!

I know you’re all dying to know who did it, and here it is: postcard number 25 million (NL-2612179) was sent by LianneK in the Netherlands on August 5th and registered today at 11:02 (UTC) by linsi in Germany. Hurray!

Lepan was the big winner of our guessing game contest, since she guessed the correct date and time at which that postcard was registered – brilliant! You’ve won a pack of 40 postcards (20 classic, 20 luxe) from MOO and a surprise set of 100 lovely postcards!

The other four lucky postcrossers who came the closest to the right time were skliu, sunzhuxian, AnnLee and Olga86 – well done! You’ll all receive a pack of 20 postcards from MOO!

Both the sender and the receiver will also receive a surprise pack of Where’s Waldo? postcards!

A huge thank you to our team of volunteers, to MOO for sponsoring this giveaway, and most of all to you – all of you who send postcards and take part on this global postcard revolution!

Come on – let’s go fill some mailboxes with smiles, one postcard at a time! :)

Anke (aka MacKittens) hails from Germany and like her username says, she loves cats! She heard about Postcrossing on one of Schöning Verlag’s paperbags and has been with us ever since! :)

Here is what she had to say to our interview questions:

How did you come across Postcrossing? What got you hooked?

I have always enjoyed buying and writing postcards. I like pretty pictures. Then I saw an ad for postcrossing on a paperbag for postcards, liked the idea and I immediately signed up. I then checked my e-mail account every 5 minutes for a Hurray message. I was so impatient! I am much more relaxed now. I only check my account every 10 minutes.

Writing postcards is also tradition in my family. I think my father writes about 10 postcards per week to family and friends and my mother sends greeting cards with beautiful pictures she took herself. I sometimes use her pictures on my postcards – professionally printed of course.

I work as a teacher at a vocational school – so I enjoy being around people. I like to get in contact with them. Now with Postcrossing I have the chance to get to know people from all over the world. I love it. It’s fantastic.

Show us your mailbox, your mailman/mailwoman, your postoffice or the place where you post or keep your postcards!

This picture shows my postwoman. She is THE BEST! My street is the very last on her trip so I get my post very late in the afternoon. But if I happen to meet her earlier that day she often tells me excitedly that I am going to receive some wonderful postcards. She likes it best when I receive postcards with cats. Just like me she is a cat-person. And if she has the time she even reads the message on the back. I like that. It is nice that even other people enjoy my postcards.

Have you met any other members in real life?

I have been to five postcrossing meetings here in Germany so far. The very first meeting was in Hamburg in August 2013 where I met frisendeern, mondkind and schlafmohn. We have been such good friends ever since and try to meet at least twice a month. I cannot imagine a life without them now!

Last year, they persuaded me to come to the International Postcrossing Meeting in Bielefeld in organized by the most wonderful nordbaer. I was so scared at first but I quickly felt welcomed by everyone. As I said: postcrossers are kind people! Now I am addicted to meetings.

Show and tell us about your favorite received postcard to date, and what makes it special.

Postcrossers are such kind people! I am often overwhelmed by the effort the sender made to please me. Just one example: In my profile I wrote that I am a huge fan of Ryan Gosling and I have received so many handmade cards with pictures of him! Thank you!!!

But to be honest: every postcard I receive is special. It is so interesting to read about the sender’s life. Rosie sent a postcard with the Prince Edward Island on it telling me that she was on holiday there – her first holiday in three years! Her job in a musical company kept her so busy. Sanna from Finland tells me that in autumn you can see many moose on the roads which can be quite dangerous; Angela from Taiwan writes about her sausage dogs who likes hugs – especially in winter; Katalonia from Finland writes that her oldest children have just moved out and she thinks it is exciting but on the other hand she also feels sad; Bonnie from China tells me that pandas are their national animals and they always look fat, and love to sleep all the time except when they eat bamboo; Maria from Russia admits that she just sat down at her desk to do some work but instead writes a postcard to me; Evy’s favorite movie is Amélie; and Judith from China is excited because it is her very first postcards she sends with Postcrossing – and these are just a few examples of the many wonderful cards I have received so far. I really liked this one from Lydia, who agreed to let me share it with you:

Have you inspired anyone else to join Postcrossing or start collections of their own?

I inspired my mother-in-law to join postcrossing. Now, whenever I come across a postcard with camels it goes directly to her address. She is even planning to do an English course when she retires so that she can write longer messages.

I also created a school account. Now I tell my students about postcrossing and have them write postcards. First, they usually look very skeptic. Writing is not really their “thing”. But then I show them the postcards we have received so far and let my students read them out loud. They soon enjoy the idea of Postcrossing and want to write at least one postcard. I encourage them not to write in German/English but in their mother tongue which makes them so proud! We have got a lot of foreign students. The postcards we receive at school I exhibit and there are always students standing in front of the pinboard during the break and reading the messages.

Have you been surprised by any place that you have received a postcard from or sent a postcard to?

I once received a postcard from Madagascar! The ID was MG-118. My lowest ID ever! Kate sent the postcard and told me that Madagascar is the fourth poorest country in the world and that she runs a charity there for poor children to go to school. Surprisingly the postcard took only 13 days to arrive!

What are you passionate about?

I am passionate about my job. I like working as a teacher! My students are 16 – 25 years old. I prefer working with older students :-) At school I organize work placements abroad. They are funded by the EU so the students don’t have to pay anything. So far we have sent students to Birmingham, Portsmouth and Malta. But I just made a contract with a lovely lady from Tampere and another lovely man from Stockholm! So soon we will also offer wonderful Finland and Sweden as work placement destinations, as well as Poland because my father works there a lot and knows a lot of companies there.

I love organizing this! I believe in the importance of a united Europe. Getting our countries closer together is so important! Learning about foreign culture and language is fundamental for a better understanding.

And I am always so impressed by the language skills in foreign countries! In Scandinavia the people speak such fantastic English. When I compare that to my students I feel rather embarrassed. A huge barrier in Germany for improving one’s English is that ALL foreign movies or TV series are in German. I hate that so much! On German TV all the TV channels are in German. I know from other countries that they only use subtitles. That is such a huge mistake we make here. I wished there would be at least one channel on TV using only German subtitles… Sometimes I am impressed by the language skills of some students and when I ask them how they have learned such good English they tell me: Online role playing games :-)

As promised, the first post on our behind-the-scenes series is about address validation. This is the process through which we check that all addresses in Postcrossing are (to the best of our knowledge) correct and complete.

“Red alert! Red alert! I think that one over there is missing the postal code!”

Addresses are one of the most important things in Postcrossing. Wrong or incomplete addresses would result in postcards being delayed or not delivered, and general unhappiness – which we would like to avoid.

There is specialized software to process addresses of course, but it’s either dodgy, specific to a country or just crazy expensive for our size. So, we chose to do this task ourselves, splitting the job between Paulo, Vicki and I. Each one of us picked a set of countries according to our strengths and learnt the UPU address format of those countries by heart. Most countries have their own format – and some are much simpler than others. We use this knowledge to go over thousands of addresses per week, spotting invalid ones, or just rearranging the order of the elements on the address. Most of the time, addresses will be read by automated sorting machines, which expect them to be written in a certain way. So if every address is formatted as UPU recommends, everything will go faster!

What makes an address invalid? Lots of things:

• Parts might be missing: name, postal code, country name, etc.
• The address might be written exclusively in the local script (Chinese, Thai, Cyrillic), making it hard to write for people who don’t understand that alphabet or those without a printer.
• The address might be completely translated into English – which is usually a bad idea. For non-Latin scripts, transliteration works better and faster in our experience.
• The address might not match the account’s location/country.

Technology helps with the last item on that list, because we can usually match your IP address to the location you’re signing up from. For instance, if a member with an IP address in Canada is opening an account in Fiji … something might be wrong, and we have to look into that. :)

A few postal operators also provide a list of all valid postal codes for their country, giving us the ability to automatically detect typos or invalid postal codes.

“Let’s just add the country name here at the bottom… I think it’ll help!”

The whole process of validating addresses has been streamlined over the years, but it still takes quite a bit of time, since every single new address needs to be checked and validated. We’ve been doing it for so long that by now we can tell at a glance whether an address is valid, incomplete or just in a strange order. We might not find all the problems – but we do spot lots of them!

Plus, we’ve learnt many nice things in the process too! For instance, did you know that an address in China should be written from the biggest component (province) to the smallest one (adressee) if written in Chinese characters, but the other way around if written in Latin characters? Or that there are no street names in Japan? Or that every house and building has its unique postal code in Singapore? It’s amazing!

I think that’s it for addresses, so I’ll leave you with one last tip: make sure that you write the address on your postcard exactly as it is shown – it’s already optimized for that country!

I hope you liked this first post on our behind-the-scenes series – we’ll get cracking on the next one! :)