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She has been a member for over 2 years (1075 days).Olá amigos :-), I live in Lisbon, Portugal, I'm a translator, I love cats and books, and now, postcards too :-)
I have a blog, Nepenthe, where I usually post postcards received, as well as on http://www.flickr.com/photos/saki_and_dharma/.
Something nice to read:
How to... send postcards
Postcards are receipts for holidays. They prove to other people how much you've spent, where you've gone and what cars were on the roads 30 years ago. There are three kinds of postcard: view of your hotel, view from your hotel and view of local attraction. If postcards did what we really wanted them to do, there'd be view of credit-card slip, of suntan and of waiter.
The downside of postcards is that you have to write on the back of them. It is estimated that 9.3% of every holiday is spent writing postcards. Bizarrely, this is almost equivalent to how much time people spend in the office working. You have to choose between writing the postcards at the end of the holiday, so they arrive home long after you do, or writing them at the start of the holiday, so they arrive home a long time after you do.
The three vital elements to the standard postcard script are room, food and sickness, in any order: lovely room, dreadful food, Alison sick; dreadful room, lovely Alison, sick of food; lovely food, Alison dreadful, sick in room. Never buy one of those long panoramic postcards for someone you don't really like because this will take about five hours to write and you will have to say more to them on the back than you have ever said to their face.
Postcards should be written on the penultimate day of your holiday, so you have something to say but you're not wasting your final precious moments. Writing a postcard is normally the first time you have actually written anything since your last holiday. You then find that you don't actually know how to write. Fortunately, no one can read your writing, so you can get away with copying out the ingredients on your suncream bottle.
The sexes have a different approach to postcards. Women pack their address book, buy 500 cards and make a big effort to write something interesting to everyone they know. Men sign the card.
The downside of buying a postcard abroad is that you then have to buy stamps. Every shop abroad sells postcards but stamps are available only at the local chamber of commerce, which is in the nearby town and open for one hour a day. If you ever wonder where all your spending money goes on holiday, it's on stamps. People rarely see the stamps on their postcards, so don't realise that they've put the local equivalent of £50 on each one. No wonder they get home so fast.
