Postcards

As mentioned before, I have joined Postcrossings, a postcard exchange website.
We have been receiving a few cards recently and the boys are loving it when another card arrives from somewhere else in the world. They are just beginning to realise that there are other countries out in the big wide world. For a long time they thought everything was in New Zealand!

These are the ones we have received recently:

From Japan

From China

This is of course helping me in my quest with sending snail mail each week. Sadly I haven't been that creative with what I am sending lately, but I am still managing to send something each week

This week I have just sent out 4 more postcards.
They have gone this time to America, Finland, China and Germany.

I was lucky enough to find some lovely cards of Hamilton and landmarks of New Zealand in a local $2 shop for 50c each. Really do need to keep an eye out for postcards so I have a collection ready for when I need to send more out. Some of the people who you send to have specific requests on the type they would like to receive! None with multi pictures on them, no churches, no animals etc Sometimes I think people should just be grateful for what they receive and enjoy receiving them.

More on Snail Mail

At the beginning of October I joined in the fun of sending snail mail every week.
I have been good so far and successfully sent something each week. Sometimes it has just been a birthday card to a friend or relative, although I did write a letter the other week and send that off.

Whilst searching the web for something at the end of October I came across this site Postcrossing.
It is a website where you register with them and then they give you an address to send a postcard to. In return your name and address gets given to someone somewhere in the world and a postcard will get sent to you.
Here is what Wikipedia is saying about it.
They even have a Facebook page.

So I joined up, and have even sent my first postcard from New Zealand to China. It took 17 days to arrive and travelled 9,350km to get there. I know cause the website tells me so!
I currently have postcards on their way to:

1. Finland 16,426km away
2. Russia 16,512km away
3. Germany 18,424km away
4. Korea 9,697km away

When you get given an address you also get given a code, this code is then written on the card and when the card is received the receiver registers the code on the website thus letting you and the website know the card has arrived.
That is how they are able to say how long it took to get there, although this is calculated from the day you request the address to the day when they register it, so if you accidently take 5 days before you send it off, and they then take a couple of days to register it then it will not be an acurate time frame but who's counting!

It is a slow process but if you have kids who want to receive postcards from around the world and you don't mind spending a couple of $$ each week (postcard = 70c or $1 and stamp = $1.90 so about $2.60 for each postcard to currently send) then you could potentially have quite a collection after a while.
Would be great for a class to do for a school year.

These are the postcards I have got to send, nice simple scenes of New Zealand and the surrounding town where I live. This seems to be what people write in their bio about what they want to receive.

I have just written a few lines on the back about New Zealand and anything else I can think to write at the time.
I will let you all know when I receive my first one and where it came from.