Postcrossing

I have my found my new favorite thing in the world... literally. I ran across this website after a friend had posted a 31 postcards in 31 days challenge on Facebook, and I was googleing postcards and this website popped up.

As I read further into the site, I fell in love. Postcrossing is a website that allows you to "send a postcard and receive a postcard back from a random person in the world"  that is straight from their website! I have always wanted a pen pal type situation but I think this is one better! 

When you are new you can request up to five addresses to send postcards to. Each postcard is given a code that you must write on your postcard. The code allows your postcard to be tracked. Once the recipient receives the postcard they go to the site and enter that code and that let's you know your postcard has been received and that you can send another one! 

I told A.Drama about my find and she was hooked too! She signed up and requested her addresses too. My outgoing postcards are on their way to Germany, Russia, the Netherlands, China, and Belarus. Hers are on their way to Germany, Russia, China, Lithuania and the Netherlands. 

First off, do you know how hard it is to find postcards when you need them?! Um, very! A.drama and I scoured the two surrounding big cities quickly and came up short handed. I ordered two books of postcards off Amazon to get us started and we did finally luck out in a used book store, finding a few old postcards with no writing on them that we could use. 

The thing that is cool about the Postcrossing website is the bio/profile pages. You get to write a little bit about yourself on your profile page with a listing of your likes and then other postcrossers can use this to help find postcards that cater to your tastes. While not required it does make things more fun! 

We need to stockpile postcards so we have a selection that we can go through to try and find ones that match the person they are going to. We are excited now to have a reason to buy the touristy postcards when you go to places and build up a stockpile. It's a totally fun new hobby.

As we sat down Saturday to write our postcards, it was actually a little difficult figuring out what to write down. I tailored each postcard to the recipient, mentioning something that was in their profile and just told them a little about where I live. In the future I will be able to tell a little something about how I got the postcard I'm sending (I was on vacation etc etc) 

It costs $1.10 to mail a postcard internationally. They have special stamps for such a purpose. They are round which makes them kind of cool, but at the same time a little boring I suppose too. We decided once we are through with these that we will purchase the regular $0.46 stamp and add with it a $0.66 stamp, that way the person getting it will get two stamps and after reading some of the profiles, people like to collect the stamps too.

Here we are sending our postcards out into the world! 

I can't wait until I get my first postcard back in the mail! I wonder where it will come from? Think you might be interested in giving Postcrossing a try?