Postcrossing Blog

We assume everyone has heard of Wes Anderson’s movies by now. From The Grand Budapest Hotel to The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, his delightfully quirky visuals and unique storytelling perspective have made him a beloved filmmaker and a cinema icon. You can always immediately tell when you’re watching one of his movies, sometimes by a single frame! There are places out there in the real world that look a lot like a scene from one of his movies, often a single peculiar house, an ornate façade or just a color scheme that evokes another era…

Enter the Accidentally Wes Anderson project (or AWA for short). They’re a community of adventurers with an appreciation for these fine idiosyncratic sceneries that play out all over the world, collecting them and displaying them on the AWA website and Instagram account. The result is a carefully curated map and galleries featuring hundreds of delightful travel-worthy locations. Anyone can submit a new location to the map, so it’s a good idea to always keep an eye out for any structure, façade or surroundings with a special symmetry that moves the imagination.

Photo by Madeleine Ryan

As fans of trips to unusual places, we love browsing these and bookmark spots for a future vacation or roadtrip. In particular, we like discovering new mail-related places, and the nice people at AWA have put together a snail mail collection that makes us very excited indeed! Check out North Hobart Post Office, Saigon’s Central Post Office, or the Post Office at the end of the world… Don’t those look like they’re all worth a visit?

The AWA community has been going strong for 5 years, and in the meantime, a book featuring the best of these locations has been published, with 500,000 copies sold around the world in 7 languages. Now, a cool postcard book joins the collection as well, featuring 26 of these special places. We’re super excited about it, and have thus partnered with them to offer a few of these to postcrossers! 🎉

There are 20 prizes in total to be won: 3 books, 2 super special copies of the postcard book signed by Wes Anderson himself, and 15 standard postcard books! There are 2 ways to participate in this fantastic giveaway, and you can choose one or both of them:

• You can explore the AWA map, and then leave a comment on this blog post to let us know which place there you’d like to travel to the most;

• If you have a postcard of a place that you think would fit right into one of Wes Anderson’s movies, send it to the AWA with a message and your Postcrossing username (written clearly)! The address is:

  Giveaway’s deadline is past, so the address has been removed.

  For this raffle, postcards entries will count double.

Because this giveaway involves postcard submissions, we’re giving it an extended deadline, so that everyone has time to dig around for nice postcards and mail them. The deadline for their arrival is January 15 February 15, and which point we’ll pick the winners and announce them on a separate blog post. Good luck everyone! We can’t wait to see the locations you share! 😍

Hurray! The German Postcrossing stamp is out and about, and the first postcards sent with it must already be arriving to the nearest mailboxes this week, and making its way around the world to many others out there. It’s been a long while since we attended a stamp launch event, so we wanted to show you a little bit of what happened in this latest one, which took place in Berlin on October 7.

The Museum of Communications Berlin very generously offered to host the day’s events, which were organized in two parts: one formal event, and the more informal meetup of postcrossers.

For the formal part, representatives of the Ministry of Finance, Deutsche Post, the Bundesdruckerei (the company responsible for printing ID cards, money and stamps in Germany), as well as philatelic associations and Postcrossing gathered in a room of the museum. Some nice speeches were made by the different parts, including an introduction to the history of postcards by the Museum Director Mrs Anja Schaluschke, as well as a speech by state secretary Dr Carsten Pillath, who also distributed special stamp albums. Although designer Greta Gröttrup couldn’t attend the event, she prepared this cute video which sheds some light on her creative process:

After some pictures, it was time for the meetup to begin!

The Lichthof (the circular hall of the Museum of Communications) was set up with tables and chairs, and postcrossers started pouring in. Some took a guided tour of the museum, while others sat down to chat and write some postcards together. We had the chance to talk with most participants for a bit, and it was just lovely to meet different people and hear their Postcrossing stories.

There was even time for a group picture, taken by Sabine (aka kroete68)!

You can see more nice pictures of the event at the Museum’s Twitter page or on the respective meetup forum topic.

It was such a fun afternoon, with so many postcards being written and sent! Deutsche Post’s special post office was super busy stamping our cards and even ran out of the new stamps. 😅

A big thanks to the group of postcrossers who put such a nice event together, to those who came and made it brilliant, and to the Museum of Communications Berlin as well, for hosting all of us on this lovely day. Hurray!

We got some special commemorative folded cards featuring the new stamp, its cancellation marks and two detachable postcards created by the stamp designer — and have a few to give away! For a chance to win one, leave a comment below with some ideas for fun meetings and stamp celebrations. The giveaway will run for a week, and Paulo’s random number generator will select ten winners by this time next Sunday. Good luck!

Friends… it was a grand party, wasn’t it? 🎉 On World Postcard Day last week, postcards were written, friends were met, and a bit all around the world, the joy of knowing we’re sharing a happy day with so many people like us was just contagious. So much buzzing energy, both online and offline… it was the best World Postcard Day yet! There’s too much to cover, so here’s a quick highlight of a few things that took place on that magical day.

First off, schools! Marjorie (aka Marjie) from Rainbows Penpal Club was busy connecting together 552 children in 17 schools and 9 different countries so that they could all exchange postcards! On the day itself, she even had time to run events on a few different libraries — how cool is that? Other schools in the UK also joined in the day, and we are so, so proud of all these teachers and educators who are raising a new generation of postcard writers!

Mailart workshops and exhibitions took place in different countries as well (like the ones in Bangalore, or in Tampere), and there were special postmarks in Portugal and Malta, at least. Besides making a handstamp available for the day, Malta Postal Museum also created a unique postcard to celebrate the World Postcard Day — as did the Faroe Post!

We cannot possibly write about all the Postcrossing meetups that took place on the day… but it warms our heart to know people got together, from Indonesia to Spain, China to the USA, India, UK or Portugal… Have a peek at the events list — there were over 100 of them!

Allow us to highlight just a couple. For instance, postcrossers and Correos de Mexico organized a postcard-making workshop to celebrate the day. It took place at the beautiful Palacio Postal (which the Little Mail Carriers visited before) and had lots of participants!

In Tallinn, a big meetup took place to celebrate both the World Postcard Day and the new Postcrossing stamp that Estonia launched on that day! A lot of the participants travelled to this meeting from Finland by boat with the Finnish Postcrossing Friends Association, who organized the meetup and took the photo on the left. Illustrators, designers and publishers were also invited to participate.

Some postcrossers cooked ravioli (remember that they are shaped like postage stamps?) on the day, and Adrienne (aka adriennefriend) and her partner made this delicious looking vegan ravioli from scratch. The filling is made of tofu-cashew cheese and fresh herbs, and even the sauce was homemade! We didn’t have much time on our hands that day, so we stuck with stamp-shaped cookies, which were also delicious.

The day happened to land on a Saturday, which made it perfect for #postboxsaturday — and so many of you joined in and posted photos of postcards alongside your country’s postboxes on social media! 😍 We loved seeing them, in all their diverse and colorful glory!

Some postcrossers have already started seeing the updated badges on your profile pages, as the postcards sent on the day start to arrive to their destinations. Over 90,000 of them were sent in the timespan that counts as World Postcard Day (in all timezones), which is massive… about 7 times more than an average day in Postcrossing. We’re relieved that the website was more or less stable throughout the whole day, as it really was not made for this kind of peaks. But everything was fine in the end! 😊 We hope these are just a few of the postcards sent on that day though, and that many more have been sent out to your friends, family, and others out there. The world’s mailboxes should be very happy indeed.

Thank you everyone, for making this such a wonderful day. It’s definitely been the highlight of the year for us, and we hope you had a nice day as well!

By the way, today is World Post Day — the day postal services are celebrated around the world, and also the anniversary of the Universal Postal Union. On the occasion, the secretary general of the United Nations, Mr. António Guterres, said:

“The theme of this year’s World Post Day – “Post for Planet” – recognizes the many ways in which postal services are finding cleaner, greener means to reach our doorsteps day in, day out. “Post for Planet” is also a call to action for the postal sector to use its position as a connector between governments, businesses, and people to take a leading role in our fight against climate change.”

The much-awaited day is here, and the new German Postcrossing stamp is finally out! YAY! 🎉 This is a very happy day for the community, who have been persistently asking for this stamp for many years. As Germany is home to the most active country by number of postcards sent, this is a well-deserved honor and a special milestone, which makes us incredibly proud. Our heartfelt thank you to the Federal Ministry of Finance, for deeming Postcrossing and this community worthy of this recognition, and for working with us throughout this whole process.

We know some of you in Germany have already received your pre-orders to Deutsche Post’s philatelic department…

… and we assume the rest of German postcrossers will march to the nearest post office today, to proudly ask for the Postcrossing stamp — like we are going to do as soon as this post is out. The print run for the stamp is 3.5 million stamps, so at the current rate of sending from Germany, these should last for 3 to 4 years a year or so… so there will be plenty to go around. Given how fleißig our German members are at writing postcards, we’re sure it’s just a matter of time until everyone else in Postcrossing receives a postcard with the new stamp… so keep an eye on your mailbox for this little gem! 😍

The stamp is available here, but sadly, Deutsche Post’s online shop does not ship their products abroad… so while it is theoretically possible to order the stamp from abroad through the phone or email, it is both cumbersome and costly. If you’d like to order some stamps, we recommend arranging a swap with a postcrosser on the forum instead.

Tomorrow (October 7) is a day for celebrations, and we’re getting together with a group of enthusiastic postcrossers for a big meetup, kindly hosted by the Museum of Communications, in Berlin. The Little Mail Carriers have been there before, and can confirm it’s a really neat museum for a visit… there are so many treasures to discover! If you’re in town, please do consider joining us — everyone is welcome!

And none will hear the postman’s knock
Without a quickening of the heart,
For who can bear to feel himself forgotten?

Night Mail, W.H. Auden

The day is here at last — it’s World Postcard Day! 🎉 This is the day in which we celebrate the humble postcard, a means of communication so simple, and yet carrying so much joy and thoughtfulness within it. Today marks the postcard’s 153th anniversary, and amidst this era’s instant messaging and email, they continue to be a treasured way to keep in touch and show someone we care for them.

Around the world, thousands of us are going to be busy writing to the people we treasure or miss, to those who need some joy or appreciation, to children and the elderly and to other fans of postcards! Some are joining one of the events taking place in museums and libraries, others are meeting in person to write some postcards together, visiting stamp shows or go fetch a special cancellation mark. It is a day to remember! And at the end of the day, there will be thousands of postcards dropped in postboxes all around the world. It makes us happy to think of all those well-fed postboxes, brimming with postcards and just waiting for the next visit of a mail carrier. What a surprise they will have the next time they empty the postbox!

If you’re in Estonia today, you’ll also be celebrating the launch of your own Postcrossing-themed stamp, so your World Postcard Day cards will feature this special stamp and be just extra cool. Enjoy!

If this is your first celebration of the day, we suggest taking some time to learn more about the history of postcards, from the popularization of the printing press, to the modern offset printing methods… and all the way to Postcrossing. 😊

If you need a break from writing so many postcards, do come share with us how you’re getting along on your World Postcard Day celebrations on this forum topic, on the comments below, or on social media using the hashtag #worldpostcardday. We’ll be reposting and highlighting some photos and testimonials throughout the day, and we hope they spread the word about the day, and inspire others to write a few postcards as well!

Happy World Postcard Day, everyone! Wherever you are, however you wish to celebrate, we hope you have a great one!

PS: Don’t forget the ravioli! Or maybe some Leibniz cookies, which someone pointed out are also shaped like postage stamps! 😋