Postcrossing Blog

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.

Jany, (aka jany_gurb) is one of the top postcrossers in Mexico. She is passionate about traveling, walking in new cities and discovering foreign cultures.

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

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

Since I was a little girl I loved postcards, my dad used to buy some of them when he was in another cities, and with the time his postcards became mine.

I was looking in the internet a place where you can exchange postcards in Mexico, and in one page there was “Postcrossing”, I read about it and I was surprise that one web like this exist; imagine you can swap a postcard with someone in another country – to me it was amazing.

So from that day (that was 3 years ago) I became a huge fan of this page!

Do you have any other interesting hobbies?

I like photography, jogging, watching football on TV, reading, listening to music and my passion is travelling. I love walking in a new city and talk with people and know their culture.

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

Here is my mailbox:

These are my mailmen:

Here is where I mail and buy my postcards:

And this is where I keep them:

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

About my favorites: all of them are favorites to me, I think each postcard I received is special because everyone has something specific to tell.
But with the very first one from Finland (left) I saw that it was a trusting postcard web project!!! And my favorite postcard #2 is this Neuschwanstein castle’s postcard (right), since it was my first postcard with this amazing castle.

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

Yes when I received postcards from countries like Israel, Qatar and United Arab Emirates they really surprise me. Those countries are so far of mine that I couldn’t believe that i got postcards from them!!

Have you met any other members in real life?

Yes i went to Italy a few months ago and I met DavideGE. He waited for me at the train station and he show me his beautiful city Genoa, also we exchange some postcards. He is an amazing guy I had a great time!!

Today’s Spotlight interview comes from North Wales. FairyFoot, or Mia is a mother and a gardener, and has interesting hobbies such as Geogaching or hosting Toy Voyagers. Here is what she had to say to our interview questions:

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

I was looking for penpals via various websites when I saw Postcrossing mentioned in many profiles I read. I decided to have a look at what Postcrossing was all about and joined immediately. I like the idea of having nice post come through my letterbox and postcards kept my mailbox happy while I was waiting for penpal letters.

Do you have any other interesting hobbies?

I like coastal and forest walks, photographing nature.. I am a penpaller and have made many new penfriends via Postcrossing. I also discovered Geocaching, the GPS treasure hunt, but I haven’t placed any caches of my own out there. I also came across Travelling Toys/ToyVoyagers too and host many soft toy visitors here.

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

Being a ToyVoyager host, I take the toys down to town and take that opportunity to send postcards on their way. This is Frankie Blue:

Below on the left is the letterbox I have in the front door. My nice postman suggested to cover the bottom window in the door to prevent people from seeing mail that may build up if we are away.

Above, on the right, is the little post office I visit out of town to buy the special issue stamps from the nice sub-postmaster. I store my postcards in boxes, and only recently organised by country after seeing toucans in a television interview:

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

I am not a serious postcard collector. One of my favourite postcards has to be JP-171165 The words say it all.

Another favourite is IS-8935 the Imagine Peace Tower memorial to John Lennon, in Iceland, the base has “imagine peace” carved in 25 different languages.

What is it your favorite part of the Postcrossing process?

I think perhaps my favourite part of the Postcrossing process is the sending. I usually have a decent range of postcards to choose from at home (and am always on the look out for postcards I think will make someone happy).

Is there anything that you are passionate about?

I love growing my own vegetables and fruit down the allotment or in the garden. Anyone got any recipes for pumpkins, marrows, beetroot, redcurrants, whitecurrants…?! I try to grow organically and have stopped buying composts containing peat.

Meet Serena, aka AllSerene from England! She’s both an avid postcrosser and a birdwatcher, an interest she shares with her cat Lucy :)

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

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

Two online friends (Enitharmon and Niles) blogged about it, within a few days of one another. I thought it sounded interesting, visited the site and was hooked! This was about three and a half years ago, not long before Postcrossing reached the first million postcards sent.

I’m almost entirely housebound, due to serious health problems, and I loved the idea both of being able to make contact with people around the world and of seeing places I would never be able to visit in person. Postcrossing has added considerably to the variety and fun in my life!

Do you have any other interesting hobbies?

Being fascinated by wildlife, I’ve taken part in the British Trust for Ornithology’s Garden Birdwatch for several years, recording the varieties of birds who visit my garden each week. This means that, as well as enjoying watching the birds outside my window, I’m able to contribute, in a small way, to environmentalists knowledge of the changing bird populations.

I also have a much loved cat, who shares my interest in bird watching (and who’s old enough not to be a danger to the birds).

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

My cards get put through the letterbox on my front door, to arrive on my doormat. My lovely posties collect any mail I leave out for them, on my windowsill.

This normally works extremely well. On one occasion though, a card, GB-37113, took the scenic route to the US, via Germany, having remained wrapped in a plastic bag (to protect them from the rain) with another card, GB-37117, destined for a German postcrosser. Luckily, maju30, having told me what had happened, very kindly forwarded it on to it’s proper destination. I must admit to being relieved that it was a postcard which took such a detour, rather than a letter to my bank or something of that kind!

I have a display of recent, and favourite cards on display in my kitchen and, when cards are taken down from there, they are stored in boxes, sorted by country. I also scan all my cards and have the screensaver on my computer set to show a slideshow of my pictures. These always provoke a lot of comment from visitors and often mesmerise them, so that discussions will be broken off when a friend’s attention has been grabbed by one of my cards!

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

I found it impossible to choose just one or two cards out of all the ones I’ve received. The pictures above show some of the cards currently on display, which are a mixture of cards I’ve recently received and favourites which refuse to be dislodged.

What is it your favorite part of the Postcrossing process?

I love requesting addresses, wondering who, and where, I will be sending a card to this time. Having received an address, I love trying to work out which of my cards that person would particularly enjoy and trying to get a feel for the person I’ll be writing to, so that I can try to make the card as interesting as possible for that person. That said, later on, I’ll be keeping a close watch for the postman, wanting to see what cards he’s bringing me that day, as I always very much enjoy receiving a new group of cards, looking to see what the pictures are and reading the messages on the back.

Natan (aka nboliveira) is one of the top (and earliest) users in Brasil. He likes travelling (both in real life and through the postcards he receives) and marvelling at the collection of stamps on his local philately shop.
Here is what he had to say:

What is your name, age and location?

My name is Natanael but everybody calls me Natan. I’m 44 years old and I live in the capital of Brasil, the city of Brasília which has an unique modernist architecture designed by Lucio Costa and Oscar Niemeyer. It’s a planned city inaugurated 60 years ago and an Unesco World Heritage Site for its architecture. I work at a telecom and recently started studying Law to be a lawyer in the future.

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

I’ve exchanged postcards since I was a child but when the internet was invented, I thought this hobby was over. In 2005 I read in the newspaper Estadão.com about the project of Paulo Magalhães from Portugal and his idea of sharing an old hobby using that new technology. I registered immediately but I didntt expect it to work out because I didn’t know that many people who would like to receive postcard this old fashioned way. Since then, six years have passed and I’m very proud to be one of veteran members of Postcrossing.

Do you have any other interesting hobbies?

I like listening to music especially lounge, bossa nova, and songs from the 80's, watching movies at home and going out with friends. Another passion is travelling, knowing different places and, of course, buy postcards from these places. Friends who travel with me already know – if I disappear, just ask where is the nearest store of postcards is! :)

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

The post office where i usually send postcards is also a philatelic store and I like go there because I can choose stamps from their huge collection and talk a little with Aurea, a friendly postal worker who is also passionate for postcards and stamps.

I keep my postcards in boxes like this. It’s not too organized but i like it bcause I can see postcards randomly and not for specific or preferred countries.

I also like to use some of my favourites to change the picture in my mobile phone.

And I put some on the table of my living room to show to my friends and family when they come home to visit me. You may notice that these postcards are in general of famous people and historical places… it’s a sure way to hook visitors and start a conversation about Postcrossing!

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

On my favourites, you can see that I really like sunsets and nature scenes, perhaps because I was born in a city of the Amazon region in Brazil. So guess I have a strong relation with nature. About my favourites, I should say that each postcard received is special on its singular message, images and stamps. But I’ll show three of them.

First, on the left, there is one that came from France (FR-65979) and I like it because for me represents the real spirit of Postcrossing: a world that share a hobby without frontiers of cultures, religion, language, social condition or politics. The second, came from Finland (FI-1130539) with an amazing sunset that I like so much. At last, one from China (CN-27229), I like this for its spiritual significance.

What is it your favorite part of the Postcrossing process?

The best part is the happiness I feel when I open my mailbox. I always smile of joy :) I specially love it when i see that someone saw my favorites and sent a postcard that I like. I always try to do the same because I know that in another part of world there will be another postcrosser with a smile on his/her face because of the postcard I sent.

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

Receive postcards from countries like Iran, Pakistan and Brunei with isolated regimes has surprised me. On the other hand that’s good because I noticed that Postcrossing is an universal way of communication.