(10 million cards is such a big number, i confess we still have a little trouble wrapping our heads around it… it feels strange to know that you are, in a way, responsible for all these postcards being purchased, written, stamped and delivered. 10 per minute, or so. yeah.)

we end up thinking about postcards (and postcrossing) all the time. that, and food.

so our friend c. surprised us by baking these cookies for us, a while back. she even did the icing with special sparkling dust!

we were so happy and surprised! aren’t they adorable? our friends know us so well! :D

i shouldn’t let the week pass without mentioning the new postcrossing stamps. they’re the reason we detoured our vacation to the netherlands, so that p. could receive the first sheet of stamps from the hands of postnl’s marketing manager.

it’s a true honour to have your work immortalised in a stamp, and somewhat of a surreal feeling too. we’ve bought the stamp and used it on postcards, but it still feels strange to think that people out there are sending postcards with it.

stamps are reserved for remarkable things, the kind that we want to collect and remember – and having postcrossing up there in that category is pretty neat. after all, how many websites have their own stamp? :)

attending a big international postcrossing meet-up has been a dream which so far had been put on hold – for the great part of the last few years we were far away when these happened. not this time though, so we said, why not? we were in europe, the trip is quick and plane tickets are not that expensive, we didn’t know helsinki (but were extremely curious), and after a summer working from home, we could use a vacation. also, our dear friends nathalie and mikko live in helsinki, so it was a very nice opportunity to visit them :)

so we came to helsinki on a mission, but boy, were we in for a treat. stay tuned for an avalanche of nordic posts! :)

a cool project that tests the limits of postal workers’ patience, one strange object at a time.

check the interview with the artist on wired magazine for some more insight on the project. a small preview:

Wired.com: You have previously published books of letters, for example one where you sent letters with odd ideas to authorities, like asking a Swedish municipality if it could host a North American Indian tribe. Why are you so fascinated by letters?
Ericson: Sending things is a fun way to communicate, and I love the seriousness in letters. I mean, you would never receive a lawsuit by e-mail. There is something about letters, especially nowadays when they are getting more and more rare, and we’re communicating in other ways instead.

every now and then, we get an email from a teacher thanking us postcrossing, and telling us about their own projects that use the site. it makes me super-super happy to know that somewhere out there, some kids are excited to be receiving postcards and learning about new cultures through them.

maybe some day the world will be a better place because these kids understand a bit about other cultures, can point the countries on a map and remember one or two things about them.

more about this happy class, here.

I already had for a letter.
Understanding doesn’t work.
It is thing that it didn’t arrive.
I was expecting it.

I didn’t arrive, and I was disappointed.

sometimes, it’s all a big mystery.

like vicki says, time really flies when you’re having fun. it’s been three years since i received the first postcard ever sent through postcrossing… and here we are now, three years and over a million postcards later, still going strong :)

this has been postcrossing‘s best year so far, i think. the project went through a heavy recoding to move it to the symfony framework, and a re-design at the same time. the re-coding made it easy for p. to introduce new features, which have been coming out steadily.
the over 55k-users’ community happily exchanges postcards and joins meetups around the world. oh, and on average, 2 postcards are being received each minute, somewhere in the planet. :D

this year, there was even a marriage celebrated between two people who met through postcrossing! how cool is that?

here’s hoping for another 3 years of growth, smiles and busy mailboxes!