Postcrossing Blog

Hello there! It took us a while to recover from the fabulous time we had in Helsinki, but here we are to tell you all about it :).

This big meetup was meticulously planned by Pooca, and exceptionally well executed. There were traditional Finnish games and yummy Finnish food, cute name tags, boat rides, visits to historical places, flea markets and an amusement park, lots and lots of presents and plenty of time to write and send postcards!

So, here’s what we did those 3 days, in detail:

On Friday, 28th September it was pre-meetup day. We met around 5pm near Aleksis Kivi statue, besides Helsinki’s train station. After the obligatory introductions (in attendance were a total of 48 postcrossers from Finland, Russia, Germany, Belgium, France, Italy, Netherlands and Portugal), the group went postcard shopping, guided by Pooca, who showed us the all best spots!

An hour later, we met at the square again, and then went off to a nearby park, where Pooca introduced the group to a curious traditional Finnish game called Mölkky. It goes like this: there are 12 wooden pins that people should try and knock over with another wooden pin, thrown from a distance. The pins are numbered 1–12, and the knocking over one pin gives the player the amount of points marked on the pin. If more than one pin is knocked over, the total number of pins is the score for that player’s round. After each throw, the pins are lifted up again in the exact location where they landed and the first one to reach exactly 50 points wins the game.

Mölkky was a lot of fun, with pins getting successively further apart and players looking for more creative ways to hit them :)

After the game, we sat down on the ground and wrote some postcards while eating delicious mini-stroopwaffles, brought from the Netherlands by dandilion.

On Saturday we met again at Aleksis Kivi statue. The main event of the day was a visit to Suomenlinna! Suomenlinna is a star fortress built on a group of islands just outside Helsinki. It was built to protect the country (at that time under Swedish rule) against a possible Russian invasion. About 900 people live in the islands, and the fortress is a Unesco world heritage site.

The weather was quite good, so we had a nice time walking on this fortress, admiring the fortifications and their cannons and the sea that stretches all the way to Tallin. Oh, and also enjoying the lovely presents and sweets that the group of Russian postcrossers, dandilion and Lotty distributed! :)

After Suomenlinna, we had some time to relax, visit some of the city monuments and fill our bellies with the delicacies in the market.

At 4pm we got back together for some early dinner. The buffet menu was delicious and in fact, our group was so big we had to split around in the two restaurant floors! :) When everybody was happy and full, we went to a coffee shop close by to write and sign all the postcards we sent! That was serious work and everybody helped counting the postcards, and re-checking for address correctness and total of signatures!

On Sunday 30th, the last day of the meetup, we visited the Valtteri flea market – a huge indoors flea market with all sorts of things! It was very intriguing yet so much fun to explore! After Valtteri, we walked to Linnanmäki, a nearby amusement park. And it was so great! We all went at once on the Panorama Tower, from where you could see a stunning 360 degrees view of Helsinki and then some of us went on Vuoristorata, a really cool and old wooden rollercoaster! We even met 'Rolle Pelle’, the mascot of Linnanmäki who accepted to take a picture with our group!

In the afternoon, we took a break in the local post office and finally mailed a grand total of 545 postcards!!! :) I’m sure we broke some record there, and made the post office people really happy!

That’s it! I am sure you can read my excitement from the number of smilies and exclamation marks I’ve used writing this post, but seriously, it was amazing. Helsinki is a very welcoming city, and there was so much generosity and friendliness in everybody we met, that I wish many more of you could have been there! Postcrossers sure are a special bunch. :)

Thank you Pooca for organizing such a brilliant meetup, and to everybody who participated and made it so special!! :)

PS – All the linked pictures are from the several meet up galleries, and you can see more of them on the following links:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/kirsi68/sets/72157622169707266/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/kirsi68/sets/72157622178384448/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/kirsi68/sets/72157622061513119/
http://s219.photobucket.com/albums/cc118/…
http://www.flickr.com/photos/mahako/sets/72157622178405020/
http://picasaweb.google.com/Delenna.from.Finland…
http://s190.photobucket.com/albums/z27/dandilion1981/…
http://www.flickr.com/photos/anjaaustel/sets/72157622088754235/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/91536860@N00/sets/72157622285729954/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/42139194@N03/sets/72157622328027854/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/nocas/sets/72157622208385341/

Have you been in a Postcrossing meetup before? How about an International Postcrossing meetup? If not, here’s your chance!

Like all Postcrossing meetups, this one is also organized by the users themselves and it’s been in the works for quite some time. Now that the details are pretty much decided, it’s time to spread the word. This International Postcrossing meetup is going to be in Helsinki (Finland) in the 28th, 29th and 30th of August.

If you are interested, here’s a summary of what’s currently planned:

Friday, 28th August:

A small pre-meeting in the afternoon for chat and coffee in a cafeteria.

Saturday, 29th August – the official meeting day

The official meeting day starts at 10am with a guided tour around city center and a trip to the Suomenlinna Island, an UNESCO World Heritage place. On the Island it’s possible to do a small picnic or have a cup of coffee. Of course, the city tour will have plenty of stops in many postcard shops!
Later in the day everyone can enjoy a meal together in a restaurant followed by plenty of time to write some more postcards.

Sunday, 30th August

A visit to the biggest flea market in Helsinki, Valtterin Kirpputori, and continue to the amusement park Linnanmäki which has an unique atmosphere. The last stop on Sunday will be the Olympic Stadium Tower in Helsinki.

Many users are already arranging to go, some from abroad with plans to visit the country for the first time!

To know more details about this meetup, just check the Postcrossing Forum where you can find more updated information about it.

With the summer stretching it’s arms and warming up more and more countries, the Postcrossing meetups are also on the rise. April was a particularly active month with at least 5 meetups that we know of and May seems to be following the same steps.

Finland on its own had 3 of them just in April, all in different cities throughout the country. Russia followed, and Taiwan had its first meetup in Taipei which gathered quite a few Postcrossers.

Here’s a quick run down of all the meetups that happened since the last update with links to photos of the events:

4th April

Finland, Jyväskylä (photos, photos)

12th April

Finland, Kalajoki (photos)

18th April

Taiwan, Taipei (photos, photos)

25th April

Russia, Moscow (photos)

Finland, Joensuu

6th&7th May

Finland, Helsinki (photos)

9th May

England, Ipswich

Finland, Jyväskylä (photos)

But it doesn’t stop here. There’s quite a few coming up soon! Here’s the agenda for the upcoming meetups:

17th May

Brazil, São Paulo

31st May

Portugal, Coimbra

27th June

Canada, Ontario

As usual, for the most updated list of the upcoming meetups, be sure to check the forum.

And because it’s much easier to describe the meetups with photos, here are some taken by Headstandguy on the Taipei meetup:

For more photos of this meetup, check this slideshow.

PS: By the way, soon we will be publishing details here about the upcoming International Postcrossing Meetup 2009 so keep tuned!

The Postcrossing meetups seem be springing a bit all over the world. These month in addition to the Finnish meetup, there were another another two in Germany: one in Cologne, and another one in Würzburg.

Although smaller, these meetups always include many postcards signed and stamped while visits to local postcards shops to re-stock are also common. The participants in the Würzburg meeting also had the chance to visit the Würzburg Residence (a UNESCO World Heritage site) and the beautiful gardens of the Veitshöchheim castle.

Here are some photos that better describe it:

On the 13&14th earlier this month another large Postcrossing meetup took place, this time in cold Tampere in Finland. The meetup had over 25 Postcrossers with some coming from Germany and The Netherlands.

Here’s what happened described by Soili, one of the attendees:

Some of the guests arrived Tampere on Friday already and they spent some time in a pre-meeting in the night life of the city. The main meeting day was on Saturday. The day was cloudy and streets were slushy but it wasn’t too cold. Some snowflakes came down from the sky every now and then. At 11 am one part of the group went to visit the Tampere cathedral and another part gathered in a postcard shop. I myself arrived Tampere later than the others and the first thing when I got there I went to that shop to check out if they had left any postcards for me. :D Then I phoned them to find out their location. So, we met each other in Moomin Shop downstairs of Tampere library. Those who visited the cathedral were there already, too.

Then we went upstairs to the library cafe and had a cup of coffee and tea. Then we started writing and signing postcards to fellow postcrossers. Previous evening I had prewritten and stamped some postcards already but since I didn’t have any Tampere postcards at home I had to write them at the cafe. It took a while to sign all the 354 postcards. Postcards kept coming endlessly to our table. Luckily, my user name is short enough to write it over and over again. :D After about two and half hours they were all signed. We put postcards to a mailbox next to the Moominvalley to get a special Moomin cancellation to them.

Our Dutch friends gave to the participants delicious gifts they had brought all the way from the Netherlands. Thanks again! Also recycling is in! Anyone could bring unsed postcards they didn’t want to keep anymore to the meeting. So anyone could take as many postcards as they wanted. Someone’s trash is someone else’s treasure. I found many beautiful postcards in the trash piles. :D

At this point some of the participants left the group. The rest of us headed for an Italian restaurant Bella Roma. On our way to the restaurant we popped in another postcard shop to buy low-price postcards. I never miss a chance to buy postcards because in the village where I live the postcard assortment is poor and they are also expensive. So, I left the shop with 60 postcards. :D

At least I was hungry when we got to the restaurant. Bella Roma is a cosy Italian ristorante. Pastas and pizzas were delicious as well the desserts like real Italian gelato (ice cream). Yummy! I was stuffed when I finished the dinner.

After 7 pm it was time to say goodbye. Some went home, some for a drink in a bar. After a couple of hours’ driving I was back at home at 10.30 pm. It was a long day but worth it.

It is great to meet other postcrossers in the real life. Some of them I had already met earlier because this was my 8th Postcrossing meeting already. It is wonderful to get to know new people, too. The disadvantage of a meeting this big is that there isn’t necessarily time to talk to everyone but maybe next time.

Luckily enough, Finland’s FI-500000 was sent from this meetup with meeting signatures. Congratulations too all Finnish members for the achievement!

(pooca with the 500,000th card to be sent from Finland.)

Don’t forget to check the forum for updates in the upcoming meetups!

PS: For more photos of this meetup, check here, here, here, here, here and here :).