If you’ve ever studied abroad, you know the struggle of bringing an extra suitcase exclusively for souvenirs, and somehow still filling it up within the first two weeks. As a chronic overpacker, the ability to even keep an extra suitcase empty has always been a struggle for me.
Upon arriving at my summer flat in London, I quickly realized I’d have to change my souvenir strategy to maximize my ability to salvage the memories I was making. The most obvious answer stood out through souvenir shops across Europe: postcards.
The beauty of postcards lies in their ability to perfectly capture the essence of a location on a small four-by-six-inch piece of card stock, all for less than a dollar!
Whether you’re in a museum, university, or on a street corner, there’s no shortage of postcards. At Blenheim Palace alone, I found eight different designs that I had to pick from to memorialize the event.
I learned on my excursions that even the special events and exhibits that museums held had custom postcards. I was not only left with a reminder of where I was, but also what made it special!
When you purchase a postcard, you purchase a piece of a place that you can take with you wherever you go. If you’re a scrapbooker like me, you can build spreads around that small piece of paper that’ll define your trip for a lifetime.
When I got home from my summer abroad with a collection of about seventy postcards from all around Europe, I had so much fun rifling through each location and designing a spread around it.
My pages have become filled with postcards surrounded by polaroids, allowing me to zoom out of the location I visited, then right back in on what made it personal. Each laugh I shared, memory I made, and sight that I saw has been contextualized with a piece of the location.
When you’re out and about in a city like London, you’ll also learn very quickly the importance of carrying a light load. When the clock strikes 9 p.m. and you’ve had a long day that consisted of 20,000 steps, four tube rides, and no ice water, you won’t want to be carrying four bags full of t-shirts or snow globes.
You’ll want nothing more than to have a measly four postcards tucked away into your bag — so light that you forget they’re even there.
Postcards gave me a way to remember my trip when I got home without being a hassle throughout the trip itself. When bouncing from hostel to hostel, I didn’t have to worry about an expensive item getting stolen or overfilling my backpack.
Postcards also made it so that I could give myself a lot more room in my choice of how to remember my trip. I didn’t have to spend an hour going from store to store to pick the perfect crewneck. If a postcard wasn’t the right fit for a scrapbook spread, I could just make another!
Shirts shrink, snow globes get dusty, and mugs break, but postcards can survive through it all. A postcard can jumpstart a scrapbook that you can pass around with your friends, Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants style, or it can be a family memento passed down to future children.
Either way, postcards are clearly the way to go. Next time you’re on a trip to Europe or even stopping at a cool place around Tallahassee, take a peek around local gift shops. You might just find a fragment of a place you can treasure forever!
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