Postcrossing - an interesting hobby

I came across Postcrossing about a month ago, when one of my friends from Portugal recommended I join this site if I liked postcards.
I do have a big collection of postcards, that I keep in a box, that I began collecting when I started travelling at the age of 18.

My postcard box

My first postcards were bought in Brasil, my first port of call on a round the world trip to 
5 different countries in 3 continents. Since then, I bought a couple of postcards in every country I visited.

So I joined Postcrossing, filled in my details, and requested 5 addresses to send postcards to.
You get given a code with letters and numbers to be written in each postcard, which identifies the country it comes from and helps identify the sender when the receiver receives it.
I wrote a little note describing the photo in each postcard - all of them from Perth - and posted them. The addresses were all in Europe.

One of the cards I sent

I got notified by email when the cards reached their destination, and to date only 3 have reached their home, having taken from 14 to 28 days to travel.
I wonder if some have taken the sea route instead of crossing the seas by plane? The post shouldn't take that long from Australia to Europe, should it?

I was quite thrilled when one of the addresses I was given was in Braunschweig, Germany - a town where we lived for almost 6 years, and where my kids were born, over 25 years ago. What a coincidence!

Today I received my first two postcards - one from China and one from the United States.
When you receive a postcard you log in, and register the code on the postcard and scan a copy of it if possible, so it's visible to anyone visiting the site. At the moment over 402 thousand people from  216 countries participate in this project with over 16 million postcards exchanged.
  

My first postcards from Postcrossing - a cat from China, and one from San Antonio in the USA

On my Postcrossing profile I wrote that I also collect stamps, and one of the ladies I exchanged a postcard with also collects stamps, so we are now exchanging stamps between Australia and the Netherlands.
Communication is done via the Postcrossing site, so no addresses need to be exchanged unless you decide to do direct swapping or other exchanges, like the stamps in my case.

So if you already collect postcards, or would like a new hobby, why not give Postcrossing a go?
Who knows maybe one day you might be sending me a postcard from your city.

And in this day and age when penmanship is a dying art and most people communicate verbally, by sms or email, it's refreshing to be able to write a few words to someone and actually put a stamp on a postcard or envelope...