Postcards from the Edge

I’d normally toss this in among my weekly list of Offbeat Travel Links, but this is just too good to wait. Postcrossing.com lets you “send a postcard and receive one back from a random postcrosser somewhere in the world”.

Their about page describes their mission like this:

The goal of this project is to allow people to receive postcards from all over the world, for free. Well, almost. The main line is: if you send a postcard, you’ll receive at least one back, from a random postcrosser somewhere in the world.

Why? Because, like the author, there are lots of people who like to receive stuff by mail. If you add to that, the surprise factor of receiving postcards from different places in the world that you probably never heard about, you can turn your mailbox into a little surprise box.

The two year old sites boasts over 20,000 users, over half a million postcards sent, and just over 30,000 postcards currently in transit on their map.

When you register, you’re asked some basic info about yourself, including your address and a brief description about your hobbies or anything else you’d like your yet-to-be-determined pen pals to know about you. I just signed up and received my first address – a Finnish man – to send a postcard to. His description simply states:

homo sum; humani nihil a me alienum puto

About.com tells me that this is a Latin phrase translating to: “I am a man; and I consider nothing that concerns mankind a matter of indifference to me.”

Pretty cool, eh? I can already see this being strangely addictive. Check out all the details at postcrossing.com.