Not quite what it seems, but that’s fine
We recently had the chance to fly Turkish Airlines. It was a series of long flights, great food, incomprehensible entertainment system. But that’s not the point of this little story.
As we always do, one of the first things we ask when we board a plane is if the cabin crew have any postcards. (Don’t laugh, once in awhile some airlines still do.) The nice lady said “What is a ‘postcard’?” That was a clue we might not get lucky. So we explained. She looked as though we had just asked her for a handful of antibiotics, or something like that, but she said she would ask around. And that was that.
Until midway through the flight, dark, nearly everyone sleeping except us, staring at Kazakhstan or whatever was down below. She handed something over, and here’s a fairly accurate summary of what she said: “I couldn’t find anything like what you described, but we had this photo of an old card in our in-flight magazine, so I made this for you.” And indeed she had. She cut out the photo, and a piece of thin cardboard, and wrapped the whole thing in plastic. The size and shape of a postcard, it’s what you see in this Blog entry.
We mean, really, if that’s not customer service, what is? No, we aren’t going to list it for sale. Some things just don’t have a price.
Many thanks to that fine lady. Sorry we didn’t get her name.
Until next time …
I assume you managed to find good postcards in some of the markets in Istanbul?
~Goloh replies: Sure did, and they will be in the site soon. But as diverse and massive as Istanbul is, we didn’t have a lot of time there, and the cards reminded us of Hong Kong’s: a bit sterile, focused on only the major attractions (Blue Mosque, Hagia Sophia, etc.), and repetitive. We are 100% certain that if we had more time, we could have uncovered more–but at least our Turkey category will be up to quota as soon as we find time to process what we found.
This has to be the nicest postcard story I have ever heard. I had forgotten that airlines used to have stocks of postcards on flights. Wonder when that died a death? For example what airline have you traveled on recently that actually had some cards?
~Goloh replies: Thanks. The story wrote itself. Cathay Pacific has a scarce selection of unattractive and largely non-aviation-related cards. I think Malaysian Airlines may still have cards of planes. EVA Air of Taiwan has great cards still–see the website for examples–but we can’t be flying all of these all the time. As far as we know, major US carriers have stopped. A friend flew Aeroflot, and asked on our behalf, but no luck. China Airlines (Taiwan, not PRC) still has cards with aircraft, plus others.