Postcrossing Blog

A group of Taiwan members is organising the fourth Postcrossing meeting in their country – and they’ve been preparing a special surprise for the event… a Postcrossing cancellation mark!

The meetup will be held on May 26th, in the city of Taichung, in Central Tawain. The group was granted permission to set up a temporary Post Office, and use a custom-made cancellation mark, which was drawn by weital. Here’s how it will look:

Isn’t it exciting?

Dodd, the meeting organiser, and all the other attendants are happy to have the first special Postcrossing cancellation, and would like to share it with 50 postcrossers around the world!

Thank you to everyone who responded – the 50 postcards have all been assigned!

For more information on this event, please check the meetup’s forum page.

Russel, (aka SonOfBilly) joined Postcrossing when the project was barely starting, and hasn’t stopped sending postcards since then… as a result, he is the second user with most postcards sent in New Zealand!

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

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

As a young 10 year old boy, an American pen friend sent me a chain letter which promised me 1,000's of postcards if I sent one to the person at the top of the list, put my name at the bottom of the list and sent the chain letter to 5 other people. My Mother said it wouldn’t work and guess what, she was right.

I now travel a lot on business, mainly throughout Asia and in particular China. I have been travelling in China now for 31 years. While travelling I have always sent postcards home to my family and extended family.

Back in 2005, not long after Postcrossing started my ISP sent out a newsletter showing interesting sites and “Postcrossing” was one of them. I immediately joined and have been hooked ever since.

I even try to send postcards while I travel. I also stock up on postcards by buying them in China, Hong Kong and have recently discovered a marvelous bookshop in Taipei called Eslite that has a great selection of postcards from around the world.

Do you have any other interesting hobbies?

Sport plays a dominant part of my lifestyle. I maintain my fitness by walking an hour a day, up to 5 days per week.

Work commitments mean I don’t have a lot of spare time but I always find time to keep in regular contact with my old High School friends with regular dinner evenings. I also watch most of my favourite sports on TV such as Rugby, Rugby League, Soccer (or Football as most of the rest of the world knows it), Motorsport (especially WRC, Formula 1, MotoGP & Superbikes) Tour de France, Olympic Games and Commonwealth Games.

Have been a season ticket holder of the New Zealand Warriors ever since they entered the Australian Rugby League competition back in 1995.

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

Luke, our “Postie” who delivers our mail, rain, shine or hail 6 days a week.

I buy my stamps from the NZ Post shop in the central shopping street of Auckland called Queen Street. The shop is called “Real Aotearoa”. Aotearoa is the maori name for New Zealand and means “Land Of The Long White Cloud”. The photo shows my friendly assistant.

This is our very basic letter box.

This is where I post most of my postcards, on the way to work most mornings, outside our local BP petrol station.

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

One of my favourite postcards was the very first one I received. It is black and white and shows the streets of Canton in China. Now called Guangzhou, it is the City I would visit the most in China. I enjoy all of the postcards I receive but a couple that stand out were of The Great Wall of China, The Colosseum, the Taichung Jazz Festival, Soccer World Cup 2010 and Finnish Nature.

What is it your favorite part of the Postcrossing process?

The sending means more than the receiving. I like to try and and match up the receivers requests with my closest equivalents. I enjoy getting a big thank you when the postcard is received and knowing that it is really appreciated.

I also enjoy finding out more information about the postcard I have received. I will try and add more information to the postcard, either when it is scanned or within a couple of weeks of having received the card. If you have sent me a postcard, please check the image to see if the information is correct.

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

I sent 2 postcards to Tuvalu. The first one was posted from China and my guess is that perhaps they didn’t realise it was a country, so it never arrived. Located in the Pacific, halfway between Australia and Hawaii they were formerly known as the Ellice Islands. Its population of 10,500 makes it the third-least populous sovereign state in the world, with only Vatican City and Nauru having fewer inhabitants. Because of the low elevation, the islands that make up this nation are threatened by current and future sea level rise.

Is there anything that you are passionate about?

The only issue that I take a real interest in at the moment is the world wide decline in mailing. The drop globally between 2008 to 2010 was 14% with one notable exception being China which continues to experience growth but from a relatively low base.

Mailing is expected to decline a further 43% by 2020.

For example in New Zealand mail volumes declined 6.7% in 2009. Slowed to a 4.9% reduction in 2010 but at the same time 7,200 new addresses were added to the delivery network bringing the total network to 1.9 million addresses. This meant the Post was delivering 20% less mail per address than they did 3 years ago.

Meet Melvin, a portable and complex contraption made just with the purpose of signing and stamping postcards!

“Conveniently built in two old suitcases, Melvin the Mini Machine is a Rube Goldberg machine specifically designed to travel the world. Each time Melvin fully completes a run, he ‘signs’ a postcard and sticks a stamp to it – making it ready to be sent.”

Melvin was created by design studio HEYHEYHEY, because they had some time to kill and needed a challenge to their creativity. How much fun would it be to have one of these for our own postcards? :D

Thank you mothwriter and badshaped, for forwarding us the video!

Last week we showed you a wonderful project by a group of Lithuanian members, who designed and printed their own postcards. They offered to send 16 lucky postcrossers a postcard from their special set… but the response was so overwhelming, they had a lot of trouble picking the winners, and therefore decided to increase that number to 45! :D

So, without further ado, the members who will receive a postcard from Lithuania are: qvovadis, AnaPinto, pierrev, strummer, MrPooney, famvanrems, tiira, Kazoline, budzin, milko, SueJames, Kirst, drup, leojus, niteshyft, cinghiospol, hulottati, Mayangiras, neitrino, Roo17, vchera, TinTin, GSD, SilentSilence, araneia, arti_baki, hillie67, Ilona500, Hansgom, geekerella, ARod26, PoppySu, signhild, Olha_K, diome, emma-cole, sofree, ceoramalho, mahoema, wikinet, MiniP, rhackett, only_rose, Dechen and zie.

Congratulations everyone! And a big thank you to this group of postcrossers, for their generosity!

On a somewhat related note, another group of postcrossers from Lithuania is currently working on convincing their postal services to make a Postcrossing stamp. If you’re Lithuanian and want to help this idea move forward, please join them on this Facebook group. Thank you!

You know when sometimes you just can’t find a single postcard that you like…?

It happens now and then, in some places more than others, and it used to happen to a group of Lithuanian postcrossers – they were frustrated by the fact that they had a beautiful country, but no way to showcase it to the world properly through postcards!

Can you guess where this is going? Of course, they decided to make their own postcards! They searched for photos on their own archives, and looked for professional photographers or illustrators who wanted to share their art pieces with the world.

A couple of months and a few hundred pictures later, they took a vote on a Lithuanian forum to choose which pictures should be turned into postcards. Sixteen postcards were chosen for this special set, and sent to a professional print shop. Six thousand postcards were then printed and distributed between the participants of the project.

The Lithuanian postcrossers who undertook this challenge told us it wasn’t an easy process, but it was very rewarding to finally have an assortment of postcards they were proud to send out!

They’re so happy with them in fact, that they’re looking forward to sharing them with you! :) They have 16 postcards set aside to 16 members. To receive one of them (sent from Lithuania, naturally!), all you need to do is leave a comment below, telling us something you know about Lithuania. You have a week to participate, and the 16 lucky users will be picked by the Lithuanian group themselves.

Have fun discovering this lovely country by the Baltic sea!