Postcrossing Blog

The Little Mail Carriers have been a bit quieter lately, but not for lack of adventures. Earlier this year, they hopped on their airmail envelope and landed in exciting Uppsala, for a winter break. There was much to discover and see, as they found out!

Greetings from Sweden! Uppsala is the 4th biggest city in the country, with a little more than 200,000 inhabitants. We arrived in late February, and stayed with Karin (aka karinoswald) and her family for a while, in an apartment on the fifth floor with a great view from the balcony!

We were greeted with the first-months-of-the-year speciality, a “semla”. The classical semla consists of a wheat bun with a core made of special marzipan and whipped cream. This is a blueberry semla with blueberry cream, which conservatives don’t consider as a real semla. And don’t ever try to give one to a Swede after April… it’s just unheard of!

Close to our temporary home, there is a wonderful nature area where we went for a walk…

… and caught a ride with some Viking friends! 8-year old postcrosser Tore (aka ToreRoland) helped us on board.

In this area, there is an old cottage with foundations from the late 1600s. It’s called a soldier’s cottage (or Torp), because the house was a part of the payment to a soldier who lived there in times of peace, and the family took care of the place in times of war.

Sweden hasn’t been in war for over 200 years, but we still have a military system and the last soldier who lived in this cottage moved out just about 60 years ago. It’s now owned by a community that takes care of the house, keeping it and the land around it in shape.

To help raise money to take care of the Torp, there’s a coffee sale eight times a year. This day, they were making waffles, and of course we wanted to help… and eat a few! :)

Our host Karin works as a nurse assistant at the Children’s Hospital, which is a part of the big Akademiska Sjukhuset (the University teaching hospital), where over 8,000 people work! We were curious to see how things work in Swedish hospitals, so we made a field trip to check it out.

Everyone who works in a caregiving position wears the same clothes — the doctors, the nurses, the nurse assistants, the dietitians, the physiotherapists, and so on. To distinguish them, they have different colours of the badge, stating their occupation. The nurses have a blue sign that says “sjuksköterska”, which means nurse. And to make things a little more fun for the children, they use a lot of colours on the accessories!

We visited some children who were staying at the hospital, and they were very pleased to see us… I guess that’s the advantage of being a toy! :) There are machines everywhere, and they can look a bit scary, but Karin explained that they’re there to help everyone cough or breathe, so they’re essential to the children’s wellbeing.

We even got to try some emergency manoeuvres! I fear we’re not quite strong enough for the task though…

Lots of postcrossers bring their postcards to the workplace, and Karin does too — she hangs them in her changing room and locker!

The hospital even has its own internal mail central, which we visited and even helped a little with the mail sorting. As a reward, we got to drive their cool mail bikes!

On March 19th, one of the highlights of our visit to Sweden occurred: we were invited to a Postcard Collector Fair, and to a Swedish Postcrossing meetup!

The fair organisers had prepared a table for us, and our host placed a looooot of stamps and postcards on it, to make the visitors curious.

Some people came to talk to us and liked the idea, but most of them only liked really old postcards that they wanted to keep, not send… Still, it was great fun to visit the fair and buy some cards!

After the fair, we went to a nearby café and wrote about 150 postcards to people all over the world, both direct swaps and official Postcrossing cards. One of the guests is number 2 in Sweden, and she had printed out 61 addresses… And at the café, some people got very curious and asked us what we were doing. They thought it was a wonderful idea, so maybe we managed to get some more Swedish postcrossers!

A few days later, we got the chance to tour the city, and see the sights. Our first stop? The Hågadal school, where a group of students exchanges postcards with the help of their teachers! They’re class 3a (aka hagadala) — look at all the postcards they’ve received so far!

Great job, guys!

After hanging out with the kids, we continued our city tour. Not far from the hospital, the 16th century castle lies with a great view over the town.

From there, we went to see the university library Carolina Rediviva, host of the very famous Silver Bible, also known as Codex Argenteus. Close to it is the University Hall, from the late 1800, which has some rune stones in its garden. They tell us about brave Vikings who did NOT have horns on their helmets, we’ve been told. That is just a modern gimmick.

Construction of the Uppsala Cathedral started in 1272 and took several centuries to complete. The towers are over 118m tall, and it’s the biggest church in the Nordic countries. Some famous kings and queens are buried here, and there’s a museum inside one of the towers.

All these historical buildings are within walking distance from each other, but we still needed a little rest on a bridge over the Fyris river, and then we wanted to play in the mini version of the cathedral! There is a botanical garden in Uppsala as well, since the famous botanist Carl Linnaeus lived and worked here, but in March (at the end of winter), it’s more like fifty shades of brown… so we didn’t go there.

We met our host’s local mailman though and got to ride on his car — isn’t it the coolest?! It was the perfect send-off to our stay in Uppsala!

Thank you Karin, we’ve had a great time discovering your city!

Where do you think we will go next?

Receiving lots of mail definitely has its perks, and one of them is all the pretty stamps you get from all over the world. I carefully cut them off envelopes and end up stashing them somewhere, waiting for that one person who collects stamps, or for the inspiration for a crafty project to strike. Sadly, most of the time they just end up forgotten, waiting for Marie Kondo to come around and ask whether they spark joy…

But they can bring joy! Patrick (aka patric) from Germany brought Bethel’s stamp initiative to our attention and we wanted to share it with you, in case you’d like to make your stamps work for a good cause. Here’s Patrick, explaining the concept:

Some time ago, I became aware of the Bethel charity here in Germany. They have a simple concept: the charity employs 125 adults with different handicaps. Members of the public make donations by sending in stamps. New stamps, old stamps, German stamps, foreign stamps… The workers there open the incoming mail and sort the different types of stamps into categories. These are then weighed and put into packages and are sold to dealers and collectors. Because of the stamps being sold by weight, they have the name “kiloware”. Believe it or not, the charity gets 400 shipments a day! That is 29 tons a year!"

Simple, right? You too can help Bethel thrive! Make a pile of stamps, or set up a collection box in your office or somewhere people might contribute. When it’s full, send it to:

Briefmarkenstelle Bethel
Quellenhofweg 25
33617 Bielefeld
GERMANY

And that’s it! Bringing joy and cleaning up in one fell swoop… Marie Kondo would be proud!

Remember the World’s Smallest Postal Service (and their fantastic DIY activity kit) which we mentioned here on the blog some years ago?

Lea Redmond and her company have been busy creating lovely new things in the meantime, and we’re here to tell you all about one of their more recent ventures — a book of letters which you write to yourself, to read in the future! 😍

The “Letters to My…” are a series of themed books, each containing 12 paper time capsules (which are a set of 12 aerogrammes bound together in a hard cover). There are several themes to choose from, from letters to your “older and wiser” self, to your baby, mom or dad, grandchild, the bride…

On the Letters to My Future Self for instance, each letter features a prompt such as “things you never want to forget” or “promises you made to yourself”. As inspiration strikes, you write down these memories or pieces of advice on a letter, which you then seal with a special sticker and save for when the right time comes. We’ll let Lea show you how it works:

Each aerogramme is beautifully designed and the thoughtful prompts encourage us to sit down with our thoughts and plans for a little while, inviting reflection and appreciation.

We’re truly enamoured with this simple yet genius idea. Wouldn’t they make perfect gifts for snail mail lovers? We think so too, which is why we’re super excited that Lea’s company Leafcutter Designs shared some of these with us — so we can share them with you guys!

We have 2 copies of Letters to My Future Self to give to two lucky postcrossers who answer the following question in the comments: If you could write one short piece of advice to your future self right now, what would you tell yourself?

Good luck everyone — remember to check back on this post around this time next week, to know whether your name was picked by Paulo’s random number generator. And a big thank you to our generous friends at Leafcutter Designs, for sponsoring this giveaway! 😊

Good news, everyone! We’re super excited about this upcoming exhibition curated by the Singapore Philatelic Museum, which features one of our favourite series ever… HARRY POTTER!!

Since the first book came out in 1997, J.K. Rowling's young wizard and his friends have been hugely popular all around the world, influencing a generation of readers. Postal operators have also joined in celebrating the series, which are naturally featured in plenty of stamps as well as postcards and fan art… which is where YOU come in. The SPM is looking for your collections and postcards, to feature on their next exhibition! 😀

If you’re a collector of Harry Potter postcards or postal stationery and would like to showcase your collection in the exhibition, please contact Mishelle (the curator) at SPM179807@gmail.com by August 10th.

But you don’t need to be a collector to participate! As is tradition, the museum is also calling all postcrossers to send in their themed postcards to them. So grab a Harry Potter card and share something with the visitors! For instance, what do you like about the series? Who’s your favourite character, or what’s your favourite scene or quote? Do tell! Here’s the address:

The exhibition is already on display, so this activity is closed.

If your card arrives before August 21st and includes your address, you’ll receive a postcard back! :) Sadly, the reply won’t be a Harry Potter card, due to licensing fees, but the postcards of the museum never disappoint.

The Harry Potter exhibition at the Singapore Philatelic Museum is scheduled to open in November, and stay on until July 2017. Now if only we had a magic spell to teleport us there…

We all know how it works: find a nice postcard, write it, and mail it off. Then, after a few days, weeks or even a little adventure later, our postcard finds its way into the recipient’s mailbox. But what happens in the meantime, after we post it on a postbox? We’ve written about mail sorting centers before (e.g., here, here or here), and the magic that goes on behind the scenes… but it’s always nicer to see it with your own eyes, right?

That’s what a group of curious postcrossers in Germany thought too, so they got together some time ago, and asked Deutsche Post for a tour of a mail sorting center — which they got, due to their persistent and persuasive requests! They turned it into a Postcrossing meetup, took pictures, sent postcards and even wrote about it for our viewing pleasure. 😊

Here are Claas (aka Speicher3) and Christine (aka Reisegern), the meetup organizers, to tell us all about it:

In the morning of June 19th, we were welcomed by employees of Deutsche Post to the “Briefzentrum 28 Bremen” (that’s the official name of Bremen's mail sorting center). This is one of more than 80 sorting centers for mail in Germany, that every day process about 66 million letters from 140,000 mailboxes throughout the country. So this is the place where postcards come to after postboxes are emptied.

Wow… they take quite a tumble! We could even see what happens to letters containing keys, coins or other loose parts when going through the machines. Can you imagine? You’d better not send things like those on a simple envelope…

The mail that arrives is sorted by size, and then a machine checks the postage and puts a special cancellation mark on the mail. Perhaps you’ve already received a postcard with a postmark from Bremen?

It shows the outline of this distribution center’s zone of responsibility and one of the city’s landmarks: the Town Musicians of Bremen (a donkey with a dog, cat and rooster standing on top of it), from the famous Grimm Brothers fairy tale!

A machine further down the line reads addresses. Did you ever notice the orange bar code on postcards from Germany? This code is printed onto the card in the sorting center, and it contains all the important information about the card’s destination.

There are plenty of impressive machines in the giant, busy hall of the sorting center. Within those machines, letters and postcards dart back and forth at breathtaking speeds.

As soon as a Postcrossing postcard makes its journey through all these machines, it finally arrives in a yellow box, together with hundreds of other letters and postcards, which will be sent to the sorting center closest to the recipient’s address. And from here, the postcard will be delivered by a mail carrier to a happy postcrosser.

If the postcard is being delivered to another country, it will instead be forwarded to the international sorting center in Frankfurt, where it will be delivered via air mail. Every day, busy and focused employees make sure that our mail will be delivered quickly and reliably.

Postcrossers were visibly impressed by all the machines and the dizzying speed at which our postcards passed through the sorting center.

After the tour was over, the meetup participants did what is a traditional part of every postcrossing meetup: sitting together, talking and writing postcards!

The cards that were written during this special meetup didn’t need to take the detour through a mailbox though — about 1000 of them were mailed directly from the inside of the sorting center in Bremen. The participants gained insight to the world of mail delivery and learned a lot about the adventurous journey of their postcards!

A big thank you to the Deutsche Post and the friendly employees of the sorting center in Bremen, who enabled us to have this very interesting day.

Thank you Deutsche Post — and thank you Claas and Christine for this wonderful report!