March 2018 – Incoming Mail

     Hey everyone, how’s it going? Hope you’re all doing well.

     I have a few pieces of incoming mail to show you today but before I get to the mail sent to me by pen pals, take a look at this incoming:

     Yes, I finally stocked up on stamps! I mean, sadly, after stocking up on stamps, I discovered the price of international mail is going up yet again. It was €1.35 and now it’s €1.50. Basically, since I started sending mail back in 2015, there’s been a 50% increase in postage cost. Still can’t believe that it used to only cost €1 to send international mail and now that’s the cost of sending national…

     This is not a post for lamenting An Post’s price increase though. Wait, side tracking a bit here. I know pretty much all my readers are non-Irish so when I talk about An Post (the Irish postal service), how do you read that? I know it looks like two English words, ‘an’ the indefinite article that goes before a word beginning with a vowel and ‘post’, another word for mail but it’s actually two Irish words which mean ‘the mail’ – ‘an’ which is an indefinite article in English is a definite article in Irish. I know, seems strange but that’s how it is. I don’t know, it just seems natural for me to see those two words together and pronounce them the Irish way but for some reason it only just clicked with me while writing this post that those are actually also two English words which are pronounced differently and then I started wondering what people are thinking every time I start writing An Post. Oh yes, An Post is pronounced basically like ‘on pust’.

     Ya, these are the kinds of thoughts I have.

     Okay, enough rambling – time to get back on track!

     First up, some exciting letters from opposite sides of the world – one from a pen pal up the road in Tipp and one from a pen pal who recently moved to Australia. It was great to hear from both these friends as in both cases it’d been a while since the last letter.

     I also got another surprise package from my friend who moved to Japan back in October. I say surprise – she did let me know that is was on its way but it was a surprise to see that from this small box…

     …sprang all of this!

     And actually even more. I tried to just spread everything out on top of my drawer unit but I ran out of space because there was so much stuff. I really don’t know how she fits so much into these boxes!

     I did also get a letter from my New Zealand pen pal but while I do have a picture of the stamp she used, I don’t seem to have one of the actual envelope – I swear I took a picture of it but it wasn’t there when I uploaded the photos to my laptop and I formatted my camera’s memory card so I couldn’t check that to be sure. Oh well!

     But here’s the stamps that came in the mail. Which is your favourite? I’m not sure if the stamps I ordered for my mail count but feel free to consider those when selecting your favourite stamp!