There is only one ordinary task you have to fulfill, when you are far away from home: send a nice postcard back to your family.

The postcard presents your whole experience in one single picture not only for your family also for their friends and colleagues. Therefore it has to be a special card, at minimum with the most monumental building you have seen or even with a gorgeous beach your family would dream about.

Shanghai especially is famous for the Pearl TV Tower, the Jin Mao Tower and for the streetscape of the Bund. It was an obvious choice to send my family a postcard with one of these architectural masterpieces.

I did not care about sending one in the first few weeks because I knew I would have plenty of time for this duty. But after I had been in Shanghai for four weeks it was time to send a greeting back home.

I searched among the sights and shops to find the best image of my time in Shanghai. In Europe you always get many different postcard sellers next to the main attractions. But to my surprise I could not even find a single souvenir shop with a big postcard selection. All I saw was a man offering a package of faded postcards.

There's a big opportunity to open a business selling postcards on the Bund, the main tourist mile, I thought. So far nobody seems to be interested in this kind of business and I could not afford to wait until somebody wakes up.

Later I went to the Foreign Language Bookstore on Fuzhou Lu to grant my family's wish. This time I had more luck and found myself in front of a board with many postcards. Some of the photos showed exactly what I was looking for: the Bund at sunset or the illuminated Pearl TV Tower with the Jin Mao Tower in the background. I liked the pictures and they seemed to be waiting for me to send them on to my family. But all the photos were in packages of 10 to 20 postcards. I only needed one single card for my family and did not know what to do with so many cards.

After a while I decided to send other cards to relatives and friends to give a meaning to the rest in the package. I looked again through the packages, but could not make up my mind which postcards would be the best. The problem was that every package consists of some nice cards and some of less importance. Half the postcards in the package show buildings nobody in my family would know, so they were useless.

Nevertheless I decided to buy them to finish the struggle of my task. I sent some cards back home and kept the others for my photo album. I thought I had made the best of the situation.

When I walked along the Bund last Sunday I realized there would have been another possibility. I found a store hidden away selling nice, single postcards. The store is inside the Bund Museum in the basement of the People's Hero Memorial Column. This discovery came too late for me but I might help somebody else to grant her/his family wish.

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