Postcrossing Blog

Hi everyone! Some time ago, the Little Mail Carriers visited the third-largest island in the world: Borneo (also known as Kalimantan in Indonesian language)! It is divided among three countries (Indonesia, Malaysia and Brunei) and sits right on the Equator, so the weather is always warm there. They were really curious to start exploring, so they joined Norita (aka noritaa) for some adventures!

On an early Sunday morning, our host woke us up to go to Siring’s recreational park, located at the heart of the capital of South Kalimantan, Banjarmasin city. This park was built on the shores of the river Siring, thus the name. There used to be a floating market at the river, but when we visited it was temporarily closed due to the pandemic. We took some photos with the river view and also in front of one floating food stall we found at the bank river. The stall was closed as it was still early.

We bought tickets to ride a “Klotok (a motorized boat) along the river. The round trip on the boat lasted about 30 minutes.

Right in front of the dock where we got off, stood the city’s landmarks, a 6.5 meters high (21 ft) statue of a bekantan (Proboscis monkey) which is a native primate of this island. Bekantan are a highly arboreal species and they live in groups consisting of one male and several females and their babies. Since there were quite many people who took pictures in front of the statue, we had to wait for a while.

We also stopped by the miniature of Banjar traditional house called “Bubungan Tinggi”. In the old kingdom time, this house was the core building in a complex of a palace where the king and his family lived. The name “Bubungan Tinggi” refers to its sharp and high roof (45 degrees steep).

We were hungry and our host took us to try a dish from the local cuisine, a rice noodle chicken soup called “Soto Banjar". Soto is a popular Indonesian chicken soup that can be easily found anywhere in the country, from a street stall to an upscale restaurant. There are many different soto in Indonesia, some of them are named based on the region where they are originated, including “Soto Banjar” as Banjar is not only the name of our ethnic group but also the short form of “Banjarmasin” (the name of our city).

Soto Banjar is made from a combination of spices such as cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves, and lemongrass. There was a chicken foot in our soup given for free, in some places you have to pay extra for them. It is served with compressed rice cake called “Lontong" and chicken satay.

After we finished eating we strolled at the river bank again and surprisingly found an antique stall, where old coins, banknotes and stamps were sold. We looked at some of them, and took a picture of us with a set of stamps from 1965. The stamps featured the founding father of Indonesia, Soekarno. Soekarno was a leader of Indonesia’s nationalist movement during the colonial period. Together with Mohammad Hatta, he proclaimed Indonesian independence day on August 17, 1945. He then was appointed as the first president and served from 1945 to 1967.

We continued strolling along and passed by a graffiti of Banjar traditional costumes and traditional house just like the one that we saw before. Traditional costumes for men are long-sleeved vest decorated with motifs, long pants in similar color and a cloth with similar pattern wrapped around the waist. For the head, they wear a headband that has one of edges is higher than the others. Women wear a top called “Baju Kurung Basisit” and sarong. The top is called basisit, and it has straps (or “sisit” in Banjarese) at the neck and hand parts.

The sun was already high but before heading back home we went to “Kampung Sasirangan” or Sasirangan village which is a center for sasirangan production. Sasirangan is a typical traditional fabric of Banjar ethnic group that are used as headbands, belts for men, as well as scarves, hoods and also a traditional tank top for women. Lately Sasirangan has been developed into an industrial product in South Kalimantan. Sasirangan is derived from the banjar word “sirang" or “menyirang" that means “to stitch together". The method in making sasirangan is a bit similar to that in Javanese batik.

The next day we accompanied our host sending her mails to the post office. Here in this city, they do not use mailboxes anymore so all mails have to be dropped at the post office. Incoming mails are delivered directly to the door of the recipients.

It was a very hot day so once we were home our host treated us with rambutan fruit. “Rambut" means hair, and this tropical fruit has hairlike spines on its outer skin. Rambutan is a garden fruit tree and in South Borneo it is common to find them either in the back yard of the front yard of a house. The fruit are usually sold fresh but since they have a short shelf life they also made and sold as pickle.

Thank you Norita, for this sweet visit to Banjarmasin! So many new things to learn about and explore… I’m sure we’ll be dreaming of monkeys, rambutan and colorful sasirangan for some time.

With their passports in hand, the little ones are already off on fresh adventures – where they’ll pop up is anyone’s guess!

The writing prompts invite postcrossers to write about a different topic on their postcards’ messages every month. These are just suggestions though — if you already know what you want to write about, or the recipient gives you some pointers, that’s great too!

I know quite a few people for whom English isn’t a first language—in Postcrossing, in the massively multiplayer online game I play, from various forums I’ve been part of over the years, and of course my wife and in-laws. My language skills are sorely lacking, though I can read French quite well, so I always speak and write in English with them. Every so often, we run into a communication barrier, and it’s usually because I’ve dropped some kind of slang into the conversation (often without even realising). Which got me curious about everyone else’s local slang!

I know I usually talk a lot about being Welsh, but I grew up in Yorkshire, and most of the time that’s the kind of slang that comes most naturally. So I offer two slang/dialect words for you: “maungy” and “chuffed”. They’re pretty much opposites, which makes them a nice pair to share.

To be “maungy” is to be whiny or sulky. I really wasn’t sure how to spell it, so I had to guess and look it up. You can hear the pronounciation on the Collins Dictionary site! “Maungy” is often used of a fretful child, old enough to be expected to behave themselves, moping around and dragging their feet and making a whole excursion into a painful ordeal. The word sounds so expressive to me, and I definitely feel a bit maungy sometimes myself… especially about having work in the morning.

“Chuffed” is a much more positive word, and one I use a bit more often (and I think is a bit less specifically Yorkshire?). You can hear how it’s pronounced from the dictionary. It means pleased, so you might be “chuffed” about good exam results or winning a competition, or finding just what you wanted in the shop. You might say you’re “dead chuffed” if you got top marks or won something really good. You’re definitely not going to be chuffed about someone being maungy, though…

How about you? Do you use slang a lot? Do you know any good local words? It’s a fun thing to share on the postcards you send this month—but we’d love to hear about it the comments here as well!

Rose Wong is a New York-based illustrator whose work can be found in the popular Flower Box set, and in the pages of The New York Times, the New Yorker, The Atlantic, and more.

Last year, Clarisse (aka CStar9) caught up with Rose via web-cast in her Brooklyn studio. All the art pictured in this interview is Rose’s work!

When did you first identify as a visual artist? You’ve said that as a child, you used to make intricate drawings in Microsoft Paint.

I’ve always been a visual artist. It was something I just liked doing. No one prompted me to do it. I really wish I had the forethought of saving all those MS Paint drawings I made back then, but it was a different time.

Deciding to go to school for visual art was a more serious step. I didn’t even know what illustration was. Drawing, right? Fine art drawing? But then I did research and saw it was more along the lines of what I thought I wanted to do.

That was a huge leap of faith for me, and for my parents who were funding me through school. My parents immigrated from China before I was born. I’m the oldest child, and they hadn’t really gone to college, so I was the first. I had cousins who had done the STEM career thing, and my parents just said, “You shouldn’t do that. You should do what you’re best at. Yeah, you should do art.”

When I graduated, I did a couple of editorials here and there — commercial jobs like book covers. But I was still very much in the student zone, figuring out my style and getting a footing in what it meant to work for clients.

I think I really became a visual artist when I started working full-time in 2018. I had been laid off from my job. And I was worried, because I didn’t ever make the decision to go freelance. I just started doing it. About a year later, when I started getting consistent jobs, I thought, oh, wait, I’m professionally a visual artist now.

The New York Times was my first client. They’ve been my repeat client ever since.

The 10 postcards in the Flower Box that represent you are “Blue No. 1” through “Blue No. 10”. Can you tell us about the roots of these cards?

Initially the drawings were black and white. But they said another artist in the box was already doing black and white, and they thought two black and white sets would be confusing. So I was like, you know what, I do sometimes draw in blue, so I digitally changed it — my inspiration being Chinese porcelain.

That was in 2017, before I did as much digital work. I was drawing from life. I used to go to the Botanic Garden to draw, after days at my full-time job. That was my oasis.

We can see some plants in one of my recent sketchbooks: these are drawn with gel pen on Moleskine.

Is that sketchbook gridded? How on earth do you make such straight lines?

Sometimes you find materials that are just right for you. Grids have informed my drawing a lot. It also just makes my brain feel good to draw straight lines and to fill in in black. I use a ruler now, but all my plant stuff in 2017 was pre-ruler, just using the grid. It was all very neat. That’s what I think adds to the “design”-ness of my work. It’s not just free-form.

This is my most recent still-life. You can see it’s a return to less linear.

What do you think is responsible for that shift?

In my craft, even for editorial, I always start off drawing. I let myself be really scribbly with pencil and paper. When you move to Illustrator, everything gets straighter and tighter. So, working from analog paper to digital — the digital has now affected how I do the analog.

In my early editorials, I was trying to imitate the tight aesthetic of digital, and it was really difficult. Illustrator has taught me how to create shapes. It’s so funny to say that, but shapes didn’t come as naturally to me when I was drawing freely. I was just drawing what I was seeing. But then I started to see the flowers and plants I was drawing as squares, circles, ovals.

Of course lately there’s a desire to go back to natural, because I feel like maybe I’m too stiff now when I draw. I’m rulering everything and making it too perfect. So, analog and digital really affect each other for me. The two are in conversation, constantly.

How do you go from observing something to creating art on the page?

I graduated from Pratt Institute in 2014, and I got my first job working at Fishs Eddy, which is a kitchenware store. I was the assistant to the product designer and visual merchandising designer, so I was working both upstairs and downstairs of the store. I had learned Illustrator in school but had never applied it. So, during this time I was turning a lot of traditional drawings into vectors in Illustrator, to be printed onto ceramic ware. I was doing that for hours — just, like, tracing a floral design — as my job. And I got really good at Illustrator, and at the pen tool!

But also at that time, I was doing a lot of location drawings with my partner and some friends who had a plein air club. I was starting to develop a style by looking closely and trying to simplify what I was seeing. Now I do image research by spending a lot of time with books, bookstores, and museums. My partner, who is a book designer, is really good about this. Before, I would just look at one thing and then try to create something. Now I’m trying to be more intentional. When I was doing my most recent zine, I had six books laid out on the floor. As much as I love my folder of Instagram saves, it’s so nice to have books around, so I’m not searching through my computer for my inspirations. I have them all together in one place that’s real.

What’s your relationship to snail mail, or to paper and stationery in general?

It’s so funny, because I love receiving stationery. I love collecting postcards. I love the images. But I don’t write many letters. I save all the wonderful postcards and little notes sent by my friends who love letter writing and care packages. I am terrible at making time to write little notes, but it might one day click for me.

Can you tell us about your Lookbook project?

Lookbook was born during COVID. I got burnt out doing a lot of COVID drawings for client work. I felt like I had no attention span to make art for myself anymore. So, for Lookbook, I gave myself like a set of parameters. I wanted a project that was basically about repeating something small and eventually amassing something bigger. I was already doing these little girl drawings and fashion drawings and repeating them in my sketchbook.

So, here you see basically the origins of Lookbook.

Then I moved to doing these in Illustrator, which was a lot quicker than drawing them. I would do them in batches of 7 to 10 and post one a day. It was a way for me to quickly create little moments of art: inspiration about this color green, or this shape I saw in real life, or a vegetable I saw that I thought was really nice. I’d try to treat my Lookbooks as if I was drawing in my sketchbook, trying not to delete anything and just keep building. And being like, okay, I’m not going to fuss over them — I’ll just move on to the next one if I have a better idea.

This is not a question but a comment: Please tell your agent that Lookbook should be packaged as a set of postcards.

I’ve had people say, you should make stickers out of this. But I’m holding out for the book first! It’d be so cool for a digital project to come back around to analog, as a book, like we were talking about before. I should reach out to book agents, but that involves all this bureaucratic stuff that artists don’t like to think about when they are making things.

What’s something you’re proud of, outside of your drawing?

I’m really proud of my ceramics. When I got laid off in 2018, my friend and I decided to take a ceramics class that we’d already been wanting to do. It was a two-month class. And I said, that’s a great idea — I need structure. I did it as a “treat myself” sort of thing. But then I just fell in love and never stopped! It has woven seamlessly into my life and changed it in ways I never could have imagined.

For me it’s a respite from digital. My ceramics are also different from my illustration because they’re very decorative. I’m finding more ways to simplify patterns within my own language. I’m building my world through actual objects, which is so different than doing it on paper.

So yeah, I’m really proud of that. I also think it kind of links to the idea of postcards, because postcards obviously have a function, but they’re very decorative. The function is what gets it out into the world, but the decoration is why you want to send it. At the end of day, a ceramic piece holds water, plants, or pencils, and but it can also be just simply pretty.

What’s a new project you’re excited about? Or something you’re working towards?

Well, I recently just finished my new zine for the Brooklyn Art Book Fair. I do riso printing with my friends from school in a project called TXTbooks. Zines and bookmaking allow me the space to explore something that I’m interested in, in a longer format, which in this case is architecture and imagined spaces.

In my zines there are no words — it’s really a free-form experience — a non-linear narrative. I want it to be an immersive journey. I love feeling like I’m capturing moments in my work.

Otherwise, I am excited to do more ceramics stuff. And I’ve been making a little foray into furniture and other bigger pieces. I’m just really excited to do… everything!

To learn more about Rose, check out her website and Instagram pages! You can also read about her roots as a digital artist, or about fashion and creativity in her recent Lookbook project.

And now, for the traditional giveaway, Clarisse is going to send 4 postcards from the Flower Box set to 4 randomly picked postcrossers. To participate, leave a comment below to share your favorite illustrator that should have a postcard box made with their art (but hasn’t yet)! Come back this time next week to check out the winners!

Today we bring you a heartwarming and international friendship story, made of many postcards, emails, meetups attended together… and Kofola, a soft drink from Czech Republic!

Anni (aka stetsflauschig) tells the story:

"So I want to share about my longest Postcrossing friendship, which is still holding up! 😊

I think it started in 2014, when I organized the first Postcrossing meeting in my city, Dresden. Back in those days my username was Fireblossom. My dear friend Vladena (ybur) attended the meeting with her two daughters and some other Czech postcrossers. It was such a lovely time and I was invited to join a Czech meeting in the same year, which I did. Everybody was so wonderful and welcoming, which was an amazing thing for me because in that time my mental health wasn’t good and I was a bit afraid about the long trip and all the people I didn’t know yet. But there was not a single bad moment and everyone was so kind, especially Vladena. She took care of me like a mother would, which I am so thankful for!

Vladena and her daughters also invited me to visit them in their home city, Prague, which I did several times in the following years. It became tradition that she would come to Dresden when I hosted another meeting, and I joined some other Czech meetings as well.

From the start, we developed a little fun thing about a Czech drink named Kofola, which I really love! Vladena would always bring at least one bottle to Dresden to make me happy, we would exchange cards from holidays and write a lot of emails. I was updated about the birth and growth of her first grandchild, and shared pictures and events from my life with her, too. It almost felt like she would be an aunt of mine, party of my “real” family, a wise and gentle woman which I could talk to and that would always think about me and send me a card or email that often arrived in times when I really needed something to cheer me up.

In the following years, the Dresden meeting grew bigger and bigger, one year we had more than 70 participants from 4 different countries… Vladena sometimes didn’t have time to join us, but when she did, it was always a true highlight to meet her again in person and just spend some nice hours together. In 2020, we had to cancel the meeting because of the pandemic, which was really sad, and in 2021 I moved away and therefore stopped hosting the meetings. We stayed in contact nonetheless, exchanging emails and cards. Even though it sometimes would take one of us several weeks or even months to respond, it always feels like I just met her a few days before when a new email or card arrived. We are currently trying to meet up again in Prague, I wanted to visit her and her family again for a long time, but life keeps us quite busy. But there is a lot of understanding and I am sure, next year we will make it!

This friendship has been truly precious for me and I will try to keep it up and meet her again as often as possible. It is one of the reasons why I love Postcrossing so much, because I learned a lot though her and all the wonderful people I have met in the meetings, especially the Czech ones. It is a special way of bringing people from different nations together who share an interest, which many people nowadays may just smile about, but the Postcrossing community is still strong and so wonderful! For me, attending the meetings, especially in another country, were a big step in overcoming my fears of traveling so far and meeting strangers. Strangers became friends, like Vladena and I did, and I still feel very close to her, even if she is far away – but when a card from her arrives in my mailbox, all that distance doesn’t matter at all."

Thank you Anni and Vladena, for sharing your story with the community! 😊

If you’ve made some good friends through Postcrossing, let us know — we love hearing these stories and sharing them here on the blog, now and then.

One of my Christmas presents this year was a book on handwriting: Script & Scribble: The Rise and Fall of Handwriting, by Kitty Burns Florey. It wasn’t a hint about my handwriting, though it’d probably be fair enough if it was: this book has been on my wishlist for a while to review here on Postcrossing’s blog! So that’s what I’ll be talking about this time.

One of the reasons I got curious about handwriting is that, when I look at the postcards I receive, I can sometimes tell what country it’s from just based on the handwriting. Which makes sense: some countries have strong traditions of teaching handwriting in schools, while others don’t, and being taught not just how to write but how to write a specific “hand” tends to produce similarities across those taught. We were taught some degree of handwriting in school, as part of recognising letters and reading handwriting, and I do remember being allowed to use ink for the first time… but I know my handwriting was vastly different to those of my peers (though near-identical with my sister’s as long as I’m using my right hand—my handwriting with my left hand is more like my father’s!).

Kitty Burns Florey’s book digs into some of this, mostly from the point of view of the US. It starts off back with styluses and Phoenician characters, discusses gothic script, etc, but quickly gets onto chapter two: “The Golden Age of Penmanship”. This features Platt Rogers Spencer (“the father of American handwriting”) in 1800, A.N. Palmer in 1904 or so, and a few related teachers. Not even really a peek of whether Spencer and Palmer’s methods were used outside the US as well, which was a bit disappointing—this part of the book could really have addressed the stuff I’m curious about, but the geographical limitation didn’t help here.

The next part of the book discusses graphology: whether personality peeks through your handwriting, and whether your character can be analysed by looking at what you write. This makes a certain amount of sense to me—people who write with flourishes and exuberance always seem more extroverted, while a rounded hand always looks almost cuddly to me… But obviously I don’t think anyone should be convicted as a criminal based on their handwriting (unless it matches a forged cheque or something), or denied housing because of it! (Apparently a thing in some countries!?) So this section was pretty interesting, though it feels to me like graphology goes too far.

The last two chapters try to deal with a big question: is handwriting still important in a digital age? Well, I think most of us here would say that handwriting isn’t exactly dead yet, given the number of handwritten postcards we receive! And probably I should improve my handwriting (especially for my left hand)… There are some lovely examples included which make me feel pretty jealous.

Overall, it was a quick read, and it was definitely interesting to learn a bit more about the ways handwriting has developed, even if it was pretty focused on the US. Not an absolute favourite for me, though!

My next book review will probably be of a new fantasy novel called A Letter to the Luminous Deep, by Sylvie Cathrall. It’s due out soon, and it sounds wonderful, and features a romance between penpals. After that, I’ll probably write up a review of Lynn M. Kolze’s Please Write, which she kindly sent me a copy of. But I’m always keen to hear ideas for my next reads, so feel free to drop by the forum thread for making book suggestions! You might need to spend some time browsing the forum before that section opens up, but after that we’d love to hear your suggestions there.

Happy reading!