A postcard's journey, step by step

1
You're really there
The app checks via GPS that you're physically in one of the supported cities. Not really there? You can always simulate a city to try the experience, staying honest about it: it stays clearly marked that you're simulating.
2
Choose a postcard
Each city has its own deck of postcards, real photos of its most beautiful corners. If you can't find the right one, you can upload your own photo and use that instead.
3
Write it for real
A real message, addressed to whoever you like.
4
Mail it
From that moment a simulated but realistic journey begins: real distance in kilometers, days calculated on the vehicle carrying it to its destination — van, train, plane or ferry, depending on the leg.
5
Whoever receives it waits
An email lets them know something is coming, but it stays sealed, no sender or preview, until the real delivery day.
6
It arrives, and opens
Photo, text, and the route it took to get there, stage by stage.

The app's sections

Home: your location decides what you see — if you're in a supported city, here you'll find its postcards to write.

Correspondence: the archive of everything you've sent and received, with each one's status: sealed, in transit or delivered.

Atlas: the world to explore, the available cities, the postcards you have in transit and the ones you've received, each with its route on the map.

Account: your profile, the address book of who you write to most often, the milestones reached and the kilometers your postcards have travelled.

To get the most out of it

Write something real, not a test: whoever receives it will wait days to read it, make it worth the wait.
Let time do its job — if it doesn't arrive right away, that's not a problem, that's exactly the point.
Every so often open the Atlas and see how far along the journey it's got.
Try writing yourself one, the first time: you'll immediately understand what whoever receives one from you will feel.
Come back and write from different cities as you pass through them, each has its own, unique postcards.

The point of all this

How CartolinaLenta works

Account

We've forgotten how to wait for something good. A real postcard used to take days, sometimes weeks, to arrive, and that's exactly why, when it did, it actually mattered: someone had stopped, chosen an image, written by hand, mailed it. Today we can send a hundred messages a second and remember none of them.

CartolinaLenta puts time back in the middle. You can't write one unless you're really there. It doesn't arrive any sooner than it really would. And whoever receives it has to wait, just like before. It's nostalgic because it looks to the past to steal its most precious thing: patience as a form of affection. But it's also still a game: collect cities, watch your postcard cross the world on a map, unlock a milestone now and then. Noble and a little silly at once, like all the best things.