Postcrossing Blog

We have another exciting meetup report to share with you, all the way from Malaysia 🇲🇾 . The Postcrossing community there is super-enthusiastic and decided to do something special this past World Post Day. They had several simultaneous meetups around the country, took lots of photos and prepared this report to inspire you all to get out there and meet each other!

The 5th Malaysian Postcrossing meetup was held on October 9th 2017, at the Kuala Lumpur General Post Office, in conjunction with World Post Day 2017 celebration and stamp launch. The meeting was held at the hall of the post office building on the 3rd floor. A total of 46+ postcrossers from all over Malaysia participated in this meetup.

Postcard signing activity commencing and some of the meetup cards produced by Malaysian postcrossers

The event start off at 10am with speeches by Mdm. Diyana Lean Abdullah (Head of Stamp & Philately Department, Pos Malaysia) and Dato’ Anuar Bashah (President of Philatelic Society of Malaysia). A short talk on “Development of Postcrossing in Malaysia & How to Promote Postcrossing” was given by Shaliza Atikah (aka Honeysha).

A postcard exhibition and competition was held at the same hall, with a total of 18 exhibition panels from 17 participants. The topics exhibited ranged widely; i.e. anime, maxicards, orangutans, postal related items, Year of the Rooster 2017, weddings, and many more. Each panel consisted of 16 A4-size frames. The competition was judged by fellow meetup participants and the President of Philatelic Society of Malaysia.

Postcard exhibition and competition

Meetup participants — big and small!

This year, the meetup was also joined by a group of students from the school SK Putrajaya Presint 14(1). They were introduced to the hobby of postcard collecting and participated in postcard writing activity and colouring competition. The event ended around 1.30pm with the prize giving ceremony for the postcard exhibition competition and school children colouring contest. A lucky draw event was also held with the prizes being postcards and souvenirs given by the participants.

Group photo of all the participants in the Kuala Lumpur meeting

Another meetup occurred simultaneously in Kota Kinabalu, the state capital of Sabah. The meetup brought together 9 postcrossers at a local restaurant and the Kota Kinabalu General Post Office. They visited the mail sorting area of the general post office and presented the staff with a cake to celebrate World Post Day.

Meeting in Kota Kinabalu with visit to mail sorting area at the post office

A mini meetup also occurred at the post office in Tenom, an interior region of the state of Sabah:

Mini-meetup in Tenom

The next day (10/10/2017), two Malaysian postcrossers (Shaliza Atikah aka honeysha85 and Kamaruzaain A. Kadir aka kamaruzaain) appeared on a segment of the TV programme “Malaysia Hari Ini” to promote Postcrossing and the hobby of postcard collecting. The programme also highlighted the World Post Day meetup, with interviews from some of the participants. The programme segment is available on this YouTube link.

Pos Malaysia and Philatelic Society of Malaysia were supportive of Malaysian postcrossing activities, providing the venue for the meetup, door gifts, competition prizes, etc. Also this year, we are able to collaborate with the Panda Post (China) which provided us with Panda Post cartoon postcards for the meetup participants.

Also, thanks to all the committee members who have contributed their time and energy to ensure the success of this meetup: Kamaruzaain A. Kadir (aka kamaruzaain), Khor Kok Keong (aka kkkhor), Matthew Lai KH (Matthew07), Nurulhuda Abdul Kadir (newrule), Shaliza Atikah (honeysha85), Tan Wei Loon (alansxi86), and Yoong Pooi Leng (plyoong).

Photo credits: Matthew Lai, Natasha Putri, Fiona Wong, Caroline Chia and May Anny.

Thank you guys, that was fantastic! 👍

No matter whether a meeting is big or small, it’s always nice to meet new friends and share the love of postcards with other like-minded people… so have a look in the meetups page for events happening near you, or feel free to organise your own on the forum!

About a month ago, a group of students in Kampar, Malaysia hosted a really nice event in their university, to spread the word about Postcrossing. It was quite successful, and everyone had a great time – so we wanted to share their story, in order to inspire you! :) Here they are:

If you are a postcrosser, you can probably relate to that indescribable feeling in finding a happy postcard sitting in your mailbox to welcome you home after a long, tiring day. A postcard is simply magical; each can only contain so few words yet enough to give you a glimpse of the life of someone living across the globe. To receive postcards personalized for you, knowing that each was handwritten by a thoughtful heart, it reminds us that the world is a hopeful and wonderful place.

Wanting to share what makes us so blissfully happy, we decided to start small in our university. One booth, 18 hours, 37 new members (not including those who preferred to register in the comfort of their own home) pretty much summed up our whole campaign. The idea of Postcrossing was very well received; many are excited and eager to restore the once forgotten postcards tradition together. To follow up, we created a small Facebook community, which is still growing each day. Hopefully if we can inspire every postcrosser to reach out and do something small, together we can achieve more.

Well, since a picture is worth a thousand words, here they come…

Our twin #1, Catherine (on the left) sharing her Postcrossing experience with enthusiasm.

Our twin #2, Angela (on the right) is equally passionate when it comes to Postcrossing.

Meng An (on the right) with potential new members. She also contributed to most of our eye-catching and colourful decorations!

Ming Zhe (on the right) – our photographer #1 and the reason why we are now obsessed with postcards. He introduced Postcrossing to the rest of us!

Yee Hong (on the left) attracting a potential member with her postcards collection.

Stewart in action! He is also the man in charge of producing our flyers and photographer #2.

Sandrene posting the first batch of postcards written by our new members.

Fantastic work! Please give a big round of applause for the enthusiastic members who organized this event:

From left to right: Angela (aka Hebe92), Stewart (aka stewartooi), Yee Hong (aka yeehongsia), Sandrene (aka sandrene), Meng An (aka mengan0716), Catherine (aka catgoh92) and Ming Zhe (aka ming_zhe0423).

What about YOU? Got any plans to spread the word about the project in your local school or university? :) Let us know how it goes!

Friendship Books (FB’s), penpals, ToyVoyagers and for more than 4 years now… Postcrossing! Ilyani, 26, from Malaysia manages to do all of this. The rest of the time she’s a busy student.

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

Ahh… long story! But short story is, I was bored and doing FB’s swap while finding new penpals. After a while I became more bored and decided to let go all the FB’s, and the person to whom I had sent the FB’s sent me postcards in return. She thought I was collecting postcards, so she gave me the Postcrossing website address to check out. I never saw myself collecting postcards, but I kind of liked receiving them from penpals and all, so I decided to give Postcrossing a try. And after I received my first few postcards just in such a SURPRISE way, I knew I gotta love Postcrossing! :)

Do you have any other interesting hobbies?

Writing/receiving letters, taking photos, ToyVoyagers! I hosted many ToyVoyagers before, and now I have my own Haris! He has visited Paris, Budapest, Rome and now he’s in Finland! He’ll soon visit Poland and Macedonia, how cool is that? I am still poor to travel to Europe, so in the meantime he’s traveling on my behalf ! :)

I blog my postcards too, I guess that’s one of my latest interesting hobbies :D Soon I’ll be back being a busy student again and I guess I won’t have much time to update it anymore. Or more honestly, cause I can’t bring my postcards to the hostel!

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

This is the place in this whole town that I visit most frequently!! I have never seen the postman personally, can you imagine? I usually see a glimpse of him passing the mailbox in our gate, and that’s all. And the postman is usually wearing black sunglasses so it’s hard to recognize him!

The place I keep postcards – I just load them into a huge box. In fact, two boxes!

And my whole postcards collection can be seen in Flickr.

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

Who says I have a favorite received postcard? I actually have 1000 of favorite received postcards!