SomethingToDo2

Are you tired of only getting bills and junk mail in your letterbox? Would you rather receive postcards from exotic places? Do you fancy the old-fashioned notion of a pen pal? All of these things are possible if you are a Postcrosser.

Postcrossing.com is a project that seeks to show that the world really is a small place, one postcard at a time. Sign up (for free, of course), fill out your profile and request an address. Send a postcard to the address you have been given. When the recipient registers the postcard, your address is placed in the pool for another random person to send you a card.

It’s $1.40 for a stamp to post a card outside of Australia. Add that to a dollar or so for the card and you have a cheap way of travelling the world without giving up your day job. My weekly spend on my new hobby is less than the cost of a good bottle of wine, and the thrill lasts longer.

It’s thrilling to get a postcard in your mailbox. Today I received one from Finland and one from the Netherlands. Beautiful images from each country and a little greeting from someone on the other side of the planet who cares enough. Sure, it’s not green. But those planes are flying anyway, aren’t they? What does one more postcard cost to send. And I walked to the post box to post it, does that count?

And it can, quite quickly, become addictive. No trip away is complete without popping into the visitors’ centre to see what postcards they sell. A recent trip to Canberra netted an eclectic haul from the National Art Gallery, the National Portrait Gallery and the Museum of Australian Democracy. The cartoon postcard of Paul Keating may stay on my bedroom wall, though — it is too good to send to anyone else!

There are more than 170,000 Postcrossers out there already, (2700 in Australia) and 4,000,000 cards have been sent. Most of the correspondence is carried on in English. But if you know other languages, you can ask for those to be used and you can get some practice in.

Postcrossing is a neat little way that shows how one deed can put a smile on someone else’s face. Go on, try it. You’ll find that you like it.