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| St. Petersburg Main Post Office I don't think it was a coincidence that our hotel was just about one and half blocks from the Main PO in St. Petersburg. And get this -- the post offices in Russia are open SEVEN days a week and twenty-four hours a day. Take THAT-- USPS! I could go in the middle of the night! |
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| Take a peek....looks promising. |
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| Like many of the buildings in St Petersburg, the post office was vast and quite busy too. I was particularly partial to the green walls. And the wooden trim. |
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| You can sit on a nice wooden bench to wait for your turn... |
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| People were filling out forms and writing letters and mailing parcels and buying phone cards....and some people were walking around taking lots of photos and picking up as many free postal forms as she possibly could.....just sayin"....... |
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| They had a really nice display of stamps, first day covers and envelopes. |
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| Love those blue post boxes! |
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| See the guard sitting there on the left? He gave me carte blanche to photograph. Can you believe it? I have been kicked out of so many PO's for taking photos and in Russian the guard said "no problem". And next to him is a door where all the stamp collectors hang out and buy stamps...I mustered up my courage and walked up to the woman working there and handed her my little "Postal Love" zine and the request to buy stamps all printed out thanks to Google-translate... and it worked! She helped me pick out some real beauties using a lot of sign language and now I am the proud owner of some great Russian postage stamps. |
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| After the PO, my intrepid husband took me on the subway to a flea market. And a very out-of-the-way flea market I assure you...absolutely NO tourists to be seen... |
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| After the subway we walked some streets, saw some delightful street vendors selling food and I might have torn off off a bunch of those ads on that pole in Cyrillic....my travel journal needed to be filled.... |
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| It is kind of fun not being able to read anything...I loved the way the writing looked. |
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| It rained the night before and the ground was muddy and it was freezing cold -- about 30 degrees. Really not the most pleasant conditions to be at the flea market but it was worth it! |
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| Too bad I couldn't fit this old typewriter in my suitcase....you don't see too many typers with Cyrillic keys here in San Francisco... |
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| Look at those keys! |
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| After all that we needed a nice hot bowl of borscht and some pickled cabbage and beets to warm us up...you would too if you had been outside freezing to death. And getting a little over-excited. (hence, the glass of wine) |
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| Russian Ephemera You might be over-excited too if you found all this paper ephemera -- photos, identity cards, homework..... |
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| Packs of old currency (that is going to be fun to collage with!) |
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| Now I just have to figure out what I'm going to do with all the ephemera, stamps, postal forms etc I picked up.... Any ideas? I am thinking of little booklets using the postal forms and Postal ATC's for each country I visited. I am slowly catching up on my out-going mail. It hasn't been a great incoming week for me but I am hoping things improve soon. SEND GOOD MAIL -- GET GOOD MAIL |
