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? :)

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!

these 2nd world war “keep calm and carry on” postcards, a spin of the original poster. wise words.

so finally, after 1 year or so on the works (and the meter getting close to the “1 million postcards received” mark), there’s a fresh new face on postcrossing.com, and a ton of new features.

(congratulations!, maybe now we can enjoy a bit of free time? :P )

lately, p. and i have been talking a lot about bali, more exactly, about spending a week or so there, in the sunny beaches.

anything to take our thoughts away from this cold weather. i don’t know who told us shanghai would be cold and dry in the winter but so far, it hasn’t been true. there’s cold allright, but there’s also a sort of silly rain falling every now and then, just to keep the levels of humidity high enough. our stomach might have already adapted itself to the food but our body is still struggling to understand this permanently wet new weather, with little aches here and there…

anyway, i digress. what i wanted to say was that today i got this card, sent to me from a taiwanese girl living in malaysia who spent her new year in bali:

so bali again, gently sneaking into our lifes. sounds like a good omen. :)