Le port

This postcard I have got from private swap. A sender is from France. Merci beaucoup Delphine pour ta carte  :)   

La Rochelle is a city in western France and a seaport on the Bay of Biscay, a part of the Atlantic Ocean. It is the capital of the Charente - Maritime departament (from wikipedia).

La Rochelle was founded in the 10th century as a fishing village which began to expand in the 12th century to reach its apogee in the following century through the wine and salt trade.

With the protestant coup d’état on January 9th 1568, the people of La Rochelle opted for the reformed side. The city then acquired the status of free city. But in 1628, Louis XIII and Richelieu laid siege to the city, which threatened the latter's policy of unification, for thirteen months. Faced with famine, the city fell and found itself without a town hall and stripped of its privileges.

Sea trade helped it back to its former glory, especially thanks to regular interchange with New France and the West Indies. From 1694, trade picked up as did the intellectual renaissance and artistic influence.

In the 19th century, wars and the French Revolution put the city into a stupor until the creation of the port of La Pallice in 1890. During the Second World War this became a German submarine base. In 1945, La Rochelle was the last French city to be liberated but luckily escaped major damage (from http://www.ville-larochelle.fr)

Temple in Japan

That's another card which I've got from Japan.

On the eastern side of the Itsukushima Shrine is the 27.6-meter tall Goju-no-to, a five-story pagoda that stands next to the Senjokaku (literally "hall of 1,000 tatami mats"). It is said that this pagoda was built in 1407. Its architectural style is a skillful combination of Japanese and Chinese features. Its warped cypress-bark roofing is Chinese style while the wooden door at the entrance is Japanese. Although visitors cannot go inside the pagoda, they still can enjoy the richly-colored Buddhist drawings on its walls and the magnificent gold decorative paintings on the upper part of its pillar. Although an ordinary five-story pagoda usually has a central pillar from its base all the way to the top, this one is made in an extremely rare style because its pillar stops at the second level.

Both this pagoda and the next-door Senjokaku have been designated as important cultural assets. Indeed, its elegantly curved roof and vivid vermilion color create a beautiful silhouette that stands out strikingly among the other features of the cityscape (from)

Kentucky's cave

Mammoth Cave National Park is a U.S. National Park in central Kentucky, encompassing portions of Mammoth Cave, the longest cave system known in the world. The official name of the system is the Mammoth-Flint Ridge Cave System for the ridge under which the cave has formed. The park was established as a national park on July 1, 1941. It became a World Heritage Site on October 27, 1981, and an international Biosphere Reserve on September 26, 1990. (from wikipedia) 

Mammoth Cave National Park was established to preserve the cave system, including Mammoth Cave, the scenic river valleys of the Green and Nolin rivers, and a section of south central Kentucky. Beneath the sandstone-capped ridges of Mammoth Cave National Park lies the most extensive cave system on earth, with over 350 miles of passageway mapped and surveyed. And yet after 4,000 years of intermittent exploration, the full extent of this water-formed labyrinth remains a mystery. (from here)

The Mammoth Cave is the largest cave in the world. There are a lot of caves in Kentucky. The Natives American used caves as their shelters. Sometimes soldiers in their civil war were also used caves as bunkers and storage places. 

In Kentucky a lot of people go to explore caves in hopes to finding artifacts.