Swaps fall into three categories electronic swaps, flat mail swaps and craft/package swaps and the number of swaps you’ve taken part in and the type are kept track on your profile for everyone to see. Many relate to sending postcards, craft supplies or artist trading cards but obviously there are many other types of swaps and with the variety there is, you’re bound to find something to suit your interest. Swaps are run by various members of the site and you can find a wide range of swaps from simple email swaps with no cost to postcard swaps with minimal cost to craft swaps that take time and ones where you could be spending €20 on a present for your swap partner. Swap-bot is a site that facilitates group snail mail and internet swaps. I myself found pen pals through the Postcrossing forums. Postcrossing also as a forum where you can chat to people, participate in specific swaps (say you want a postcard from a particular country) and even find pen pals. The great thing about Postcrossing is that it’s free to join and you can send postcards as often or as infrequent as you like, it just depends on your mood and your budget. If you don’t want the commitment of a pen pal but still want the joy of sending and receiving mail, Postcrossing is the place to go and I recommend it to everyone. You can fill your profile out with as much or as little information as you like (but it’s always good to tell others a bit about yourself so they can personalise their messages to you) and the only people who see your address are those who are sending you a postcard. When the postcard arrives at its destination, the person registers it using the code you wrote on it and then your address is given to a random person somewhere in the world who clicks that ‘send a postcard’ button. Pick out a postcard, write a brief message and send it off. You click on ‘send a postcard’ and get given the address of another member on the site, along with a postcrossing code to write somewhere on the card. The tagline of the site is “send a postcard and receive a postcard back from a random person in the world!” and that pretty much sums it up. I think this site is where a lot of people start. Warning: this will be a pretty long and wordy post! Hopefully it’s of use to those of you out there who are interested in finding pen pals. Obviously this isn’t all that there is out there, but I’ve compiled a list of places where I’ve either found pen pals or swaps. I get comments sometimes from people asking about where they can find pen pals so this seems like a topic worth writing about. So you want to find a pen pal and write some letters but, where do you go to find a pen pal? It can be hard knowing where to start – give a google search and you might find a lot of results but seeing so many sites can be overwhelming and let’s face it, some are better than others.
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