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British Mensa Travel Special Interest Group |
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It's
in the post On the recommendation
of a Mensan friend, I’ve joined www.postcrossing.com.
It is described as ‘a project that allows anyone to receive postcards
(real ones, not electronic) from random places in the world.’ I suspect
I am rapidly becoming addicted, but in a good way! I signed up and was assigned five random addresses (Finland, Poland, Thailand and two in Germany). Each postcard has a unique ID number which is logged by the recipient. To begin with, you can only have five postcards ‘travelling’ at any one time. As each one is logged, you can request a new address to send one to. It is interesting to read the profiles of the postcrossers. Some reveal a lot about themselves, some very little. Parents do it as a project with their children, and one of the local secondary schools in my town has its own account. As you might suspect, English is the main language used, but is by no means the only one. I wrote my postcards to Germany half-and-half and even tried out my rudimentary Finnish (I bet that surprised the nice lady in Turku). Some postcrossers request specific types of postcard and list pictures they want and do not want. As more and more are exchanged, an impressive range of statistics is amassed on your page, including for instance the total distance in kilometers covered by all your postcards in the system. In this electronic age, it is still a pleasure to receive a postcard through your letterbox. If it is of a foreign destination, perhaps in a different language, with unusual stamps, and a snapshot of someone else’s life, it is all the more fascinating. You can make further contact with your correspondents, but there is no requirement to do so. The administrators rightly make a big deal out of maintaining privacy. You can upload the postcards before they go and after you receive them and, over time, you build up a gallery of images. It’s a bit like trainspotting or stamp collecting, but is ideal for the armchair traveller/linguist. First published in VISA 96 (Apr 2011) |