Today in Pen Pal, Em receives her first letter from Kaya

[asakiyume]

In her diary, Em writes

I got a letter! I got a letter today—it was in with a doctor bill and ads, a letter for me! And it came from a different country. The stamp has a picture of flowers and mountains.

Let's take a moment to appreciate airmail envelopes and lovely stamps:

airmail envelope

Source: here

datura on a stamp from Laos

Source: here

Indonesian stamp showing Tengger, site of four volcanoes

Source: here

And thinking of small post offices, and PO boxes . . .

postboxes in Maryland Maine [thanks for the correction, seaivy!]

Source: Going Postal blog

. . . took me to the Going Postal blog, described as "A photo journal of post offices and places." The blogger travels across America, documenting post offices large and small. Post offices are a little like libraries--special, wonderful places, so important for communities.

Comments

[stormdog.livejournal.com]

That really sounds like my kind of photography project. Nifty!

I just love the post office I'm often near in Evanston, near Chicago, with it's vaguely Soviet-nationalist statuary on the south exterior wall. There are so many neat post offices out there! I'll have to go look through those photos.

[stormdog.livejournal.com]

And you know, on the topic of airmail letters and interesting stamps: I once bought, on Ebay, a medal given to the people who worked on cleaning up after the Chernobyl disaster in Ukraine. I was just fascinated by the envelope it came in that was made out of some kind of plastic-like food container. I think it had tomato sauce in it once. It was turned inside out and folded and stapled into an envelope, and it had airmail stamps on it. I kind of wish I'd kept it, though it also still had questionable bits of what might have once been tomato sauce in it, which is why I didn't.

tomato sauce

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

Wow, that really is an *actual* slice--or not slice, but smear--of the sender's daily life.

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

One of the post offices featured on this blog had really excellent architectural details that I think of as Art Deco, though I'm not sure if that's accurate, and that same post office had a massiveness and stateliness that seemed sort of Soviet-heroic, too.