Travel Tips

Postcards are the latest items I have tried to collect - there were others before (if I were to dedicate a couple of pages to each one of my unsuccessful collections I would use more than 100MB of web space)... But I do collect just three sorts of them: view postcards and those that feature koalas and St. Bernard dogs.

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HISTORY OF MY COLLECTION?

The first card I bought was the one with the views of Bruxelles and I did so only to get rid of the Belgian franc coins that cost little and you can not exchange them later - had there been the Euros already I would not have had such a postcard. But still there is a long road between a single postcard and a collection, though one has to start somewhere.

The second point was the collection shown to me once by my fellow student - she brought huge numbers of postcards from the Scandinavian countries.

When I went to Switzerland I got my revenge - I brought more than 100 cards from there (including some from Italy and France). Swiss postcard industry must have got a considerable boost from my shopping spree:))) My trip to Tunisia just reinforced the trend with another lot of postcards finding place in my room. The easiest thing is to buy the postcards of Russia - I add them to the collection after paying my visits to the various bookshops of Moscow. If you want any, drop me a line, OK?

My latest tour around Europe provided even more momentum, with my buying of more than 300 postcards, including some of the places as rare as Niger or Mali! Yes, a collector's delight:)) Other cards were the ones my relatives/friends brought me, as well as those received in postcard swaps…

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MY COLLECTION – FACTS AND FIGURES:

Parts of the World – Present: Antarctica, Africa, Asia, Australia & Oceania, Europe, North America, South America
Parts of the World – Missing: Central America
Countries: 55
US States: 32 (out of 50)
Canadian Provinces: 5 (out of 12)

AFRICA:

The countries I have are: Algeria, Egypt, Libya, Madagascar, Mali, Namibia, Niger, Senegal, Tanzania, Tunisia

ASIA:

The countries I have are: Bhutan, Burma, China, Cyprus, India, Indonesia, Iran, Japan, Jordan, Kyrgyzstan, Laos, Malaysia, Nepal, Russia, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, Turkey, Vietnam

EUROPE:

The countries I have are: Austria, Belgium, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Italy, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Monaco, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Russia, Slovakia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, Ukraine, United Kingdom.

NORTH AMERICA:

The countries I have are: Canada, USA

OCEANIA (+ AUSTRALIA):

The countries I have are: Australia, New Zealand, French Polynesia

AMERICAS:

The countries I have are: Argentina, Bahamas, Brazil, Chile, Martinique, Peru, Trinidad & Tobago.