Postcrossing Blog

This week’s spotlight interview comes from marja2006, from Finland! She and her daughter are avid postcrossers, and even her son contributes to the collection! Here is what she had to say:

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

I saw a short story about Postcrossing in the newspaper – I googled to find the link to the pages. This happened in 2006. I have always loved to receive postcards. When travelling was not so easy, people used to send much more cards – now when people travel a lot, there are not so many who would send a postcard from their holiday – even if you asked them to! For a lazy traveller this is also a great way to see the world – you can see places you would probably never visit, and a postcard can show you the familiar places in a way you would never see them if you were there yourself as the weather and the lights vary a lot.

It took about a year before I had enough of courage to go to the forum and join the tags and Round Robins, but then I was hooked with tags and swaps…

Do you have any other interesting hobbies?

I don’t have too much time for hobbies, but taking photos is one of them. I used to play piano when I was young, just for own fun. My daughter takes me to concerts every now and then (or is it the other way around?) – and tries to keep me up with what’s popular.

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

My mail comes to postbox, which is in the postoffice next to the railway station. In this picture the postoffice is in the left, with the orange and blue colours of the Finnish Post.

Here’s a closer look at the postoffice from outside, with new postboxes for priority mail (the blue boxes) and economy mail (the orange boxes):

I also take my cards mostly to the ladies in my postoffice for cancellation. Here’s a picture of one of the lovely ladies at my postoffice taking care of my mail:

and here’s how it looks inside my postoffice:

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

There are so many postcards which are special and there are so many new lovely cards coming every week, but here are some of them:

This card I received from my forum friend mlysao from Tahiti – she had it made as a maxicard for me with the special cancellation of the solar eclipse – it really warms my heart to think it arrived from the other side of the world as a RAS:

Another RAS card which made me very happy, a card from Shanghai meet-up in 2008, sent by Linying and signed among others by Paulo and Ana, the founders of Postcrossing:

And I am not wondering at all that Paulo and Ana ended up in Slovenia when I look at this beautiful postcard, one of my all time favourites, which I received in my biggest swap ever:

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

Card from Greenland with ID GL-8 was a nice surprise at the time there were not many active users and also cards from Uruguay, UY-32 and UY-45 were nice surprises – neither of them was sent by a local user! Both of them came from a user with Finnish background! :D And I felt really lucky when I received a card from Tuvalu – TV-222 – which was sent to celebrate the Earth Day.

Have you inspired anyone else to join Postcrossing or start collections of their own?

Only my own daughter – she had a long break with it, but now as Finland was approaching the id FI-1000000, I got her writing some cards, too, as we read a comment of my postcrossing friend’s daughter of teamwork in Facebook.

I am also very happy of the fact that my younger son sends postcards when going on holidays – not only to me but others as well! And he also buys cards for my collection!