I, like many of you, consider myself a cosmopolitan — I love to travel, I love new acquaintances from many countries, I love souvenirs. And I really like to receive postcards from different countries — with handwritten greetings on them, with unusual stamps and other cool things. Today I will tell you about Postcrossing, a postcard exchange service.
The most difficult thing in exchanging postcards is to get the address of someone who really needs your postcard and who is ready to send it to you in return. Previously, forums were used for such purposes and even special books were published, now everything is much simpler.
You just need to register on the Postcrossing website. After registration, you will have to write a few words about yourself and specify your mailing address — you will receive postcards to it. Immediately after registration, you will receive five addresses selected from the project database in random order — five of the most diverse addresses from any country in the world. You will have to send postcards to these addresses. As you can already guess, someone from the users of the project will get your address. Of course, the service is completely free.
Each address is accompanied by a postcrossing code, which, for example, looks like this: RU-727145 (where RU is Russia, and 727145 is a special code). When your recipient finds the postcard in his mailbox, he will enter a code on the website and confirm receipt. You will be able to find out how long your postcard has been going and what path it has traveled, as well as send another one (at the initial stage there may be no more than five postcards on the way).
If the postcard does not arrive for a long time, then it goes to the Expired status and is soon "removed from the balance", so you will not suffer from a decrease in the number of received and sent postcards.
It is best to send postcards without an envelope, but simply by pasting a sufficient number of stamps on it (for Russia it is 22 rubles) and dropping them into the mailbox — many people really appreciate postage stamps. You can write anything on a postcard, the main thing is not to forget the code.
Despite the fact that this whole idea seems rather mediocre, postcrossing is an incredibly exciting way to communicate with interesting people from all over the world. Often simple "postcard" contacts develop into a real friendship. Anyway, postcards are a real way to understand that we live in the real world, and not in the Matrix.
Here you can look at the postcards that I received over the year.
