Why Postcards?

 

My name’s Monica, I’m 23 and I live on the sunny island of Guernsey.

The truth is, I’m a bit of a geek when it comes down to it and something about postcards really appeals to me.

As a child, my grandparents had a wall of postcards filled with messages from friends and family in the far corners of the world. And as someone who has never left Europe (although plans for the immediate future may well change this – yay!), the idea of travelling through these little windows of beauty became immediately appealing and I always sent out postcards to friends and family when I went away in hope they might remember me on their trips.

Sadly, most of my postcards from childhood have become lost in time and space, but more recently I started using the internet to get my little postal kicks. Initially, I used the site Interpals, asking friends on there to send me a postcard from their hometown. Eventually though, I branched out to Postcrossing, and that’s where the real fun started! Suddenly I realised I could create goals for myself: reach a certain amount of countries, collect all the American states, etc etc. At the start, it was all about the beauty of the card, having a new country in my collection, the sentimentality of having a little handwritten message from someone in a far corner of the globe, but it’s become much more than that.

Initally, I was a little embarrassed to admit my unusual hobby to people I actually knew, but when I did start telling people, something completely unexpected happened: more of my friends began to postcross as well. And that’s when I realised the hidden beauty of postcards and the true community spirit of the whole thing. Admittedly there are probably many users who do it purely to enhance their own collection, but there are so many people out there who have another motive: giving joy to  a stranger who they have never even met.

Through collecting postcards I feel like I have seen the world, met some fantastic friends and hopefully passed on a little joy myself. Although I still love the buzz of getting a ‘rare country’ through my mailbox or an elaborately beautiful card, the real excitement of my collection these days is finding the right card to send to someone else and being lucky enough to have a brief exchange of words with another person somewhere on this planet who I will probably never meet.