Chinese Poem

Postcard ID: CN-1122099
Country: China

A sender wrote me on the back side of this card: "This is a poem from my country - China. Hope you like it!". I like look of this card, however I have no idea about the sense of this poem :)

Meanwhile there is interesting Chinese stamps:

The Imperial Palace

Postcard ID: CN-1126996
Country: China

From the back side of the card:

This is a view of the Forbidden City in Beijing. It was the Chinese Imperial Palace from the Ming Dynasty to the end of the Qing Dynasty and now houses the Palace Museum. For almost 500 years, it served as the home of emperors and their households. The Forbidden City was declared a World Heritage site in 1987 and it is listed by UNESCO as the largest collection of preserved ancient wooden structures in the world!

I really like this card as it;s beautiful, with really interesting history and has great decor:

Also there are nice stamps on the card and on envelope:

Winter cat. Oxana Zaika

Postcard ID: UA-886326
Country: Ukraine

This card is wonderful! I've fallen in love with it once I found it in my mailbox.

This beauty postcard is painted by Oxana Zaika.

Oxana was born in 1969, began to draw as a child. She graduated Art College in Moscow  after studying at the art school . In addition, she graduated later from iconography and batik courses. Currently Oxana  lives  in Lyon, France.  She draws everywhere and with different materials, depending on the circumstances. But lately, she prefer watercolor  more and more. Also Oxana participated in many exhibitions in Russia, Tunisia and France.

Greetings from Nebraska

Postcard ID: US-2535893
Country: USA

Nebraska is a state on the Great Plains of the Midwestern United States. Its state capital is Lincoln. Its largest city is Omaha, which is on the Missouri River.

The state is crossed by many historic trails, but it was the California Gold Rush that first brought large numbers of non-indigenous settlers to the area. Nebraska became a state in 1867.

There are wide variations between winter and summer temperatures, and violent thunderstorms and tornadoes are common. The state is characterized by treeless prairie, ideal for cattle-grazing, and it is a major producer of beef, as well as pork, corn, and soybeans.

Nebraska is the 9th least-densely populated state of the United States. Ethnically, the largest group of Nebraskans are German-American. The state also has the largest per capita population of Czech-Americans among U.S. states.

This snowman came to me with the card:

Also there are nice stamsp:

Alice in Wonderland

Postcard ID: UA-884893
Country: Ukraine

I think that this is absolutely amazing card. I like Alice in Wonderland like a book and films, so like all connected with it :)

Alice in Wonderland is an 1865 novel written by English author Charles Lutwidge Dodgson under the pseudonym Lewis Carroll. It tells of a girl named Alice who falls down a rabbit hole into a fantasy world populated by peculiar, anthropomorphic creatures. The tale plays with logic, giving the story lasting popularity with adults as well as with children. It is considered to be one of the best examples of the literary nonsense genre. Its narrative course and structure, characters and imagery have been enormously influential in both popular culture and literature, especially in the fantasy genre.

Also this card contains amazing post stamps:

Call cats correctly

Postcard ID: RU-2246045
Country: Russia

This beauitiful card was painted by Russian artist Victoria Kirdiy. The back side of the card contains a nice poem abot cats. It's a little difficult to translate it to English as we have formal and informal 'you' in Russian and so this poem says that we should address to cats only in formal way :)

The most important thing
Don't even try
To be on first name terms with a CAT
Because even the smallest
CAT is a CAT

Here are animals from the Russian stamps:

Greetings from Görlitz

Postcard ID: DE-2750823
Country: Germany

Görlitz is a town in Germany and the capital of district of Görlitz. It is the easternmost town in the country, located on the Lusatian Neisse River in the Bundesland (Federal State) of Saxony. It is opposite the Polish town of Zgorzelec, which was a part of Görlitz until 1945.

Historically, Görlitz was in the region of Upper Lusatia. However, in 1815, some parts of Lusatia were integrated into the Province of Silesia, and later into the Province of Lower Silesia. Görlitz is the largest city of the former Province of Lower Silesia that lies west of the Oder-Neisse line and hence remains in Germany today. Thus it is both the most Silesian city, in terms of character, and the largest, in Germany today. This is not unjustified since the city adapted to a large extent to the rest of Silesia when it was part of it administratively. The city combines Lusatian and Silesian traditions as well as German and Sorbian culture; since 1950 the town and its population have been influenced by the proximity to Poland, across the Oder-Neisse-line.

Due to the historical parts of the city, many movie-makers have used the various sites as backgrounds. Today the most prominent example is Quentin Tarantino who shot the movie-in-a-movie Pride of the Nation for Inglourious Basterds (which incidentally purports to be Sicily) on the Untermarkt and Obermarkt in Görlitz' oldest parts of the city. In addition The Reader teen years were shot in the town, rapid restoration work making the shoot difficult.

Here is the stamp from this card:

Karadag. The Karagach mountain

Postcard ID: UA-865570
Country: Ukraine

Kara-Dag is mining and volcanic massive on the territory of Crimea, on the Black Sea. Maximum Height is 577 m. Title Karadag is translated from Turkish and Crimean Tatar languages ​​into Russian as "black mountain".

There is a legend about a "Karadag monster" that lives in the sea at the foot of.

Here is one stamp:

and once more:

The last one is about the first star of Russian silent cinema - Vera Kholodnaya. Only five of her films still exist and the total number she acted in is unknown, with speculation ranging between fifty and one hundred.

Memorial Hall of Founding of Yilan Administration in Taiwan

Postcard ID: TW-1079798
Country: Taiwan

Yilan, officially known as Yilan City, historically spelled Ilan or I-lan, is a city and the county seat of Yilan County, Taiwan. The city lies on the north side of the Lanyang River. The Yilan Plain in which the city is located was originally known as the Kapsulan Plain or the Komalan Plain. These names, as well as that of Yilan itself, were given to the sites by the Kavalan tribe of Taiwanese aborigines. Later arrivals included Han Chinese settlers during the Qing Dynasty in China (1802) and settlers from Okinawa during Taiwan's period of Japanese rule (1895-1945).
Area: 29.40 km²
Population: 94,188 people (2004).

Memorial Hall of Founding of Yilan Administration is one from tourist attractions.

Oat cookies

Postcard ID: UA-868183
Country: Ukraine

Do you like oat cookies? I like.

The main ingredients of the dough are oats, flour, butter (or margarine), egg and spices (often vanilla or substitutes, and cinnamon). Cookies are molded from the dough, spreaded on a baking sheet and baked.The composition of the test may include walnuts, hazelnuts, peanuts, raisins, sunflower seeds, chocolate, honey. Sometimes cookies are made with fillers - such as jam .Cookies usually has a rounded shape.

Yummy-yammy!

The stamp is so colourful!

Life is so cool :)

Postcard ID: DE-2704553
Country: Germany

This card looks so simple, however this is really positive :) I love ice-cream and everything is so cool now :)

Here is the German stamp:

Illustration by Fiep Westendorp

Postcard ID: NL-2203925
Country: Netherlands

Sophia Maria "Fiep" Westendorp was a Dutch illustrator who became especially popular due to her long-term collaboration with writer Annie M.G. Schmidt. Three generations of Dutch people have grown up with her illustrations. The drawings she made for Jip en Janneke, a series of stories which ran in Dutch newspaper Het Parool from 1953 to 1957, now adorn a variety of items sold by Dutch department store HEMA. Since the regular Dutch awards for illustrations always eluded her, she was given a unique award for her entire oeuvre in 1997. Since 2007, the University of Amsterdam have an endowed chair for illustration in Westendorp's honor.

Happy New year!

Postcard ID: FI-1957714
Country: Finland

Here is one more card about winter and New Year. All these cards bring me happy mood and expectation of something good :)

Wish you all the best in upcoming New Year -2014!

Here is boy with trees from postcrossing stamp:

Children on a sled by Josef Lada

Postcard ID: CZ-364317
Country: Czech Republic

This is one more card with winter theme. It's painted by Czech artist Josef Lada.

Josef Lada was a Czech painter and writer.

He is best known as the illustrator of Jaroslav Hašek's World War One novel The Good Soldier Švejk. He produced nearly 600 cartoons of the Švejk characters, depicting Austria-Hungary officers and civil servants as incompetent, abusive and often drunk. All subsequent editions of Švejk used Lada's illustrations, except for the 2008/2009 Czech edition illustrated by Petr Urban.

Born in the small village of Hrusice in a cobbler's family, he went to Prague at the age of 14 to become an apprentice binder. He loved to draw and paint. Entirely self-taught, he created his own style as a caricaturist for newspapers, and later as an illustrator. He wrote and illustrated the adventures of Mikeš, a little black cat who could talk.

Lada produced landscapes, created frescoes and designed costumes for plays and films. Over the years he created a series of paintings and drawings depicting traditional Czech occupations.

He won the Deutscher Jugendliteraturpreis in 1963. The asteroid 17625 Joseflada has been named after Lada.

The Czech stamp is: