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! :)

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.

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!