Terri Dunbar-Curran
I TAKE a sip of my cappuccino and flip over the postcard of proteas I chose especially for Olya. She’s a maths teacher who lives in Belarus with her daughter and a small furry menagerie. We’ve never met, but I know she loves reading, sewing and cooking and she has a pet rat called Senya. She also loves Postcrossing. So do Marina from Osaka in Japan and Annisa from Jakarta in Indonesia – I’ll be writing their postcards next, better get a coffee refill lined up.
The idea behind Postcrossing is simple: sign up for free online and put together a profile – listing a little about yourself, or the sort of postcards you’d most like to receive. Then click the “Send a postcard” button and the website will generate the name, address and profile of another random user somewhere in the world.
Then for the fun part: find a card you think they’d love, buy some stamps, write them a note and find your closest post box. Once your card reaches them, and they register it online using the postcard ID number you included on the card, another random user somewhere else in the world will get your name and address to send a card to.
Living in South Africa you need to be patient – our mail can take an eternity to reach its destination. It once took eight months for one of my postcards to make it to China (I swear I could have walked there myself and delivered it faster) and I have others that have been in transit for over a year, yet I still can’t bring myself to lose hope.
Likewise, postcards from the rest of the world sometimes trickle in at an infuriating rate. So I’ve put a note on my profile warning people to be patient. But that moment when you open the postbox and see something waiting for you that isn’t a bill – it’s totally worth the wait.
The project was started by Paulo Magalhães from Portugal and opened to everyone in 2005. I chatted to him to find out more and asked if he still remembers his first card. “Well, of course! Although, back then Postcrossing was just a side project of mine and I had no idea it would ever become this popular,” he says. “I developed Postcrossing in my free time and when it came time to test it out, I asked some friends to sign up. The very first postcard was from me to Ana Campos who happens to be Postcrossing’s community manager nowadays. It was a postcard with a lighthouse which is one of my favourite things. Now this postcard is on Postcrossing’s office to remind us of how it all started with a single postcard.”
So, what does one write to a complete stranger on the other side of the globe? Some people give tips in their profile. They want to hear about your city, what you’re reading, your hobbies. Some want you to write phrases in your home language with translations. Others like poetry, or home-made cards.
It’s kind of like single-serving penfriends. You write to them once, then when they register your card there’s a little space for them to send a quick message back, and then it’s on to the next postcard. But each card you send and receive is special. My initial plan was to display them all as they arrived – but I’ve just hit the 120 card mark, and the tin I’ve been keeping them in already won’t close.
It seems the perfect person to ask for card-storing advice is Paulo himself. “We love to have our postcards in a postcard rack: one of those rotating ones that you see in shops displaying their postcards,” he says. “They are not easy to get since usually only shops get them, but we managed to get a used one from a friend and we now use it to put our most recent postcards. They are great because it’s so easy to flip through all of them, to pick them up and put them back. Albums tend to be harder to do that with, plus they require more time for organising. I think the postcard rack solution works better for me and it’s great when we have guests as they quickly gravitate to it to see all the great things we get in the mail.”
It’s easy to see how this hobby could get out of hand. Not to mention the impulsive need to buy unusual postcards whenever you see them (in case you get someone who that card of a quizzical lizard licking a raspberry would be perfect for), and stockpiling stamps so that the Post Office price increases don’t make too much of a dent.
Every Postcrosser develops their own style. That’s why, even if you do end up with duplicate cards (I haven’t yet) they’re each unique thanks to the message on the back.
I received my first card back in December 2014 from Moni in the north of Germany. It shows a brightly-lit Christmas market, and Moni tells me a little about her town. Since then, I’ve received cards from an 84 year old retiree, young professionals my age, a couple gearing up for their wedding, a four-year-old whose aunt helps her write her messages but not her name (that she does herself), a group from an old age home and so many other different people. And with each card comes a glimpse of another culture, a brief connection with someone I’d never have come into contact with were it not for our shared hobby.
The thing Paulo loves most about Postcrossing is the element of surprise. “I never know what I’ll get, so it’s always fun to check the mailbox!”
To date 35,866,352 cards have been received through Postcrossing, having travelled a collective 180,840,856,234km (that’s 4,512,560 laps around earth). My mere 119 cards sent account for 1,341,072 of those kilometres alone. I love perusing the map on my profile to see where my cards have landed up.
South Africa currently has 1 711 Postcrossing members and boasts 85,106 cards sent. Russia represents with 76,454 members, but Germany comes out tops in the “cards sent” stakes with 4,862,579.
I tend to geek out a little when it comes to Postcrossing – but isn’t that what a good hobby is all about?
Over the past decade, the thing that has surprised Paulo most is the community that has grown up around Postcrossing. “Even though the element that connects us all is the postcard, it is mostly about the random connections created between two random people that makes it interesting: the serendipity of it all creates an unlikely community of people who enjoy the pleasures of small details in things and the diversity of our world.”
Running the project takes a lot of time, but Paulo still makes space for other hobbies, like running half-marathons and Geocaching. “Like many people, I love to travel, specially the slower way, to enjoy the little details and getting to know the places a little better. Also, I’m a geek at heart so anything tech related will easily grab my attention.”
Stirring a fresh cuppa, I write to Martina from Germany about my recent visit to the Company’s Garden veggie patch and pop a bright little bee sticker next to her address – she’s really into flowers and plants. Perhaps one day the system will give me Paulo’s address and I’ll get to send him a little glimpse of Cape Town too.
l www.postcrossing.com