(Kingston, Ontario, Canada)
In the years leading up to my nearly year-long travel sabbatical in 2014, I found that my regular vacations weren’t quite enough to quench my growing thirst for travel. I had some great summer trips: Iceland in 2008, the Canadian Maritimes in 2009, Norway in 2010, and Sweden, Finland, and Estonia in 2012. And also some great skiing trips, to places like Zermatt, Andermatt, St. Moritz, Wengen, and Val Gardena.
To satisfy that thirst, I became part of the Postcrossing Project. It was a great way to see more of the world while still maintaining a full-time job.
How does it work? You sign up, and then request an address. You get sent a random address of another Postcrossing member somewhere in the world. You send a postcard to that member and, when they register it upon receipt, your address then becomes the next one to be randomly given out to another member.
In 2010, I sent my first card to somebody in Czechia. The recipient registered it 6 days later, and 8 days after that I received my first postcard…from Utrecht in the Netherlands! You can have multiple postcards travelling at once, and I eventually sent (and received) about 1000 postcards by 2014.
There are variations as well – I did “direct swaps” with some people, and you can also join special groups. We even met a Postcrosser once in Estonia. But it was the most fun to just do the random thing – get a random address, and then get a surprise from someone else in the world a few weeks later. Our mailman loved it – we still had mail delivered to our house, and he told us that our mail was fascinating.
The project is worldwide, although the odds of getting a card from Europe, North America, and east Asia are higher because those regions have more members. When I was active (up to 2014) I received the most cards from Germany, the Netherlands, the U.S.A., Russia, Finland, Taiwan, China, Belarus, Poland, and Ukraine.
I’m sure that the most active countries have changed in the intervening 10 years. But you do learn that most people (especially those in a project like this one) are usually very different from their political leaders.
My 2014 year of travel made it more difficult to stay on top of my Postcrossing, and the increasingly high cost of international stamps in Canada was also a factor in scaling down my involvement. I’ve only sent a handful of cards since then. But Postcrossing is still a very active community today, and you end up learning a lot about the world and its people.
Today’s blog entry features postcards from some of the countries that were less familiar to me at the time (the card at the very top is from Jerusalem, Israel). Some of them I even ended up visiting! In fact, I’ve found a lot of interesting things in my Postcrossing files…maybe I’ll share some more in my next post.
