Postcrossing Blog

Hanako's dreamy posts on Instagram caught our attention some years ago. Featuring quirky Japanese mailboxes, pretty stationery and her own beautiful artwork, they made us dream of visiting the “land of the rising sun”… but pandemic years were tricky for making trips abroad, so we did the next best thing, and sent the Little Mail Carriers instead! 😊 Here they are, to report on their adventures!

Kon’nichiwa! Many greetings from Japan, where our host Hanako lives and does her art (including postcards for Postcrossing meetings)! She promised to give us a tour of Tokyo, so let’s get started! First stop: a post box! This is what a normal postbox in Japan looks like.

We headed to the Kyobashi Post Office in Tsukiji, Tokyo. Today the special stamps “International Letter-Writing Week, 2021” were just issued. We had the first-day postmarks put on the postcards and on an envelope made from a museum flyer. The stamps are showing famous woodblock prints by Hokusai. Everyone knows his iconic “The Great Wave off Kanagawa”… but did you know the painting is part of “Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji”, or that it used a new kind of blue pigment which revolutionized Japanese prints?

About half of post offices in Japan have their own pictorial postmarks. These postmarks are called 風景印 (fukeiin). We had the fukeiin of Kyobashi Post Office put on our little passport. It illustrates a scene from Sukeroku (known as The Flower of Edo, in English), one of the most famous plays in the Kabuki repertoire.

Kabuki is a type of Japanese classical dance-drama, characterized by elaborate stage makeup, fancy costumes and stylized performances that date back to the Edo period. Why does the fukeiin stamp show Kabuki here? Because the Kyobashi Post Office is located near Kabuki-za, the principal theater for Kabuki plays!

Next, we visited Ueno Station. In Japan, you can find special souvenir stamps like this at railway stations, museums or tourist spots. If you travel around Japan, we really need to bring a notebook for stamp collecting!

Awwww… isn’t it cute? We saw the panda postbox near Ueno Zoo, which is the oldest zoo in Japan. Twin pandas were born here in June 2021, and they were named Xiao Xiao and Lei Lei.

Yay! We found the Pokémon manhole-cover in front of the National Museum of Nature and Science! Hanako says manhole-cover hunting is one of the pleasures of a trip to Japan. There are various kinds of manhole-covers with local design.

Another one is here in front of the Tokyo National Museum! There are many museums in the Ueno area, so you can’t see all of them in one day. If you visit Japan for the first time and need to choose only one museum in Ueno, we heard the Tokyo National Museum is a good one to see, so that’s where we are headed! The building was built in 1937, and is often used as the location for Japanese TV dramas.

We took our time looking around the exhibits. The Tokyo National Museum has many national treasures as their collection. Above is one of them, the Tachi Sword made by Yoshifusa in the 13th century. Have you watched “Seven Samurai”, the Japanese film directed by Akira Kurosawa? Samurai swords are quite interesting cultural artifacts, not to mention really beautiful.

This work of sculpture titled “Aged Monkey” made by Koun Takamura is famous among Japanese philatelists, because it was selected as the subject of the 60-yen stamp from the Modern Art Series, issued in 1983. Of course, we bought the matching postcard, too!

Aaaaaaaah, the museum shop is a postcard paradise! 😍 How many should we buy?! Can’t decide because all of them look amazing!

It’s about time for lunch! OK, we have soba here today. Soba is a noodle made from buckwheat and is popular as healthy food. Chopped spring onions (also known as scallions) and grated ginger go well with it. The soba restaurant Yabusoba in Ueno was established in 1892. Hanako showed us the cute soba stamp issued in 2016.

After lunch, we came to Tokyo Skytree by bus! This 634 meter-high tower was completed in 2012 and became a new symbol of Tokyo.

We visited the Postal Museum on the 9th floor of Tokyo Solamachi, the shopping mall under Tokyo Skytree. The Skytree postbox warmly welcomed us.

The exhibits in the museum are super interesting for postcrossers! Here are mail carriers’ caps from the early 20th century. The caption says the straw hat was for summer. It’s cool, isn’t it?

And this is a replica of the postal snowmobile in the 1940s and 50s. Wow, we want to try to drive it, it looks like the perfect size for us!

We also saw some cancelling stamps in the early 20th century. It’s always fun seeing old postal tools.

And at last, we arrive at the counter of the old post-office, used between 1920s or 1930s to 1988 at Kanda Sudacho Post Office, in Tokyo. How many postcards and letters have crossed this counter over the years? And how many stamps it must have seen!

Sadly, this is where our tour of Tokyo comes to an end. It was a lot of fun to return to Japan so many years after our trip to Okinawa, to discover a bit more of this fascinating country! Where do you think we should go next?

Thank you Hanako, for showing the little guys so many cool things about Japan! We’re dreaming of visiting and “collecting” all the cool manhole covers and special postmarks… 😍

Have you ever heard of Malta? It is an island country in the Mediterranean Sea, between Italy and Libya, and despite its small size, it is a very densely populated country, filled with interesting history… including postal history! The Little Mail Carriers begged us to go visit, and so we sent them on to meet Lara Bugeja, the museum’s curator. Here is their report!

Ħello everyone! 👋 We arrived in Valletta, Malta’s capital on a beautifully sunny day and made our way to the Malta Postal Museum. We stopped outside for a photo and to admire the Baroque facade of this converted Valletta home. Lara mentioned everyone at the museum was delighted to see us as they had never had anybody so small visit!

Our first stop was in one of the galleries where an exhibition of landscape paintings was being set up. Did you know that the Postal Museum also functions as a Art Hub? We were lucky to see this nice exhibition coming together, from our perch on a wonderful sunset.

But we came here to see stamps and letters, so Lara gave us a whistle-stop tour of the museum. It was so much fun deciphering the script on the archive of letters, and admiring the wax seals! Most letters were in French, but some were in Italian, English and a few were in Maltese. The earliest form of postal service in the island dates from the early 1530s, when business letters were carried by small sailing vessels between Malta and Sicily.

We then hopped up onto one of their old postal counters and played for a bit, pretending to buy and sell stamps. The Museum has a fully functional post office, which in the past few years even had special postmarks for the World Postcard Day!

On a screen there was a video playing about mail distribution during the times of the Malta plague epidemic, so we got to learn about the deadliest event in Maltese history, which took place between December 1675 and August 1676. At the time, it was thought that paper could transport the disease, so mail was quarantined and disinfected. Although the video was interesting, we were horrified by the sheer number of rats that poured out of the screen… quite scary for us, being so small!

For something lighter, we decided to climb to the top of one of the museum’s motorcycles! The James ‘Captain’ 200cc motorcycle was used in the 1960s by postmen delivering to the more rural and inaccessible areas of Malta and Gozo. We managed to get up there safely, but it took us a while… Then, since we were already at it, we did the same with the bicycle near the entrance – and once we made it to the top, we had a good rest and brought out a picnic lunch!

After all these activities, we were quite exhausted, so we left to have a very well-deserved rest. Everyone in the museum was super nice, and we were delighted to meet them!

Thank you Lara, for taking care of the little ones and showing them the Malta Postal Museum! Into their padded envelope they go, and who knows where they will land next… 😉

It’s not everyday one gets an invitation to learn more about the history of printing presses and how they work… so when the invitation came, the Little Mail Carriers jumped into their envelope and made their way to the north of Germany, where the newly revamped Museumsdruckerei Hoya (Hoya’s Printing Museum) is re-opening today! Here they are, to tell you all about what you can discover inside.

Being Mail Carriers, we hold many paper goods in our hands every day. These are letters and postcards in various sizes and colors with all kinds of stamps on them – lots of printed and written paper. Like thousands of postcrossers in the world, we are fascinated by stationery, paper and other printed matters. So are our hosts Claas (aka Speicher3) and Christine (aka Reisegern), who have shown us today how the printed letters and images have been applied to paper since ages.

They invited us to come with them to Hoya, a small town on the river Weser in Northern Germany.

Once we arrive in the letterpress printing office Museumsdruckerei Hoya, we are welcomed by Michael Linke, who built up an amazing collection of printing presses and types over thirty years.

Right at the entrance of the museum, we spot a figurine on a wooden construction. Michael, who’s that?

“That’s Johannes Gutenberg”, Michael explains. “The figurine is placed on a reproduction of the Gutenberg printing press. Gutenberg is known as the inventor of modern printing.” While we drink some coffee and eat butterkuchen, a typical northern German cake, Michael tells us about the history of printing:

"Already several thousand years ago, simple printed (stamped) seals were used in Egypt and Mesopotamia. More progressive printing technologies were developed in China more than a thousand years ago. For printing books, in the beginning whole pages were carved into wooden blocks, later on moveable letters were invented. That made printing much easier, though for printing something in Chinese, a lot of different characters were needed.

“In Europe, books were mainly multiplied in monasteries by copyists — all handwritten. Until at the end of the Middle Ages, in the 15th century, Johannes Gutenberg triggered a gigantic media revolution. He used moveable letters made from new materials, found a new ink recipe and invented a special printing press. He combined known printing technologies and his inventions to an efficient printing system. This allowed inexpensive, high-quality mass media production for the first time. The Gutenberg printing system spread across Europe and the whole world.”

But what are moveable letters? Michael encourages us to explore the printing workshop, where we find an aisle full of drawers.

Opening them, we discover an overwhelming amount of moveable letters in different sizes and fonts. Yay, let’s take some of them and build a word! It’s a bit complicated, as all those letters are mirrored.

Michael lets us know: “Before the invention of digital printing, all printed texts were composed by typesetters. They put every single character of the texts line by line into composing sticks, which were then transferred to the printing press.” Wow, what an effort! Can you imagine how many types a typesetter has to handle for a daily newspaper?

In another drawer we find images that look like rubber stamps, but they are made of metal instead of rubber, some very old ones even are woodcuts.

Let’s take some and see what they look like when they are printed! We’ll combine them with the text we composed in the composing stick. For our first printing experiments, we use a very simple printing press. We put our design in there, add printing ink, lay a sheet of paper on top, close the lid and press firmly.

That’s fun! Look, the images at the bottom of the page seem to be postal stamps. Michael, would that be possible? Michael explains: “Of course. Stamps were also printed with so-called printing clichés (that’s the name of those images).”

Does this mean, we could print our own stamps in this printing workshop? 🤔 “Good idea!”, Michael says, “We can print your personal stamps here. Did you iron your uniforms? I’ll take a photo of you.” With those photos, a metal cliché is being produced.

We are so excited! The cliché is fixed in a big printing press. Now we have to work very accurately, because if the height of the image is off by even a tenth of a millimeter, it can make a difference that’s visible in the quality of the print.

Can we now print? “I think you forgot something”, says Michael. “You need to grab some printing ink.”

Oh gosh, that’s some thick, sticky stuff. Michael smirks and shows us his totally paint-smeared work coat. “Indeed. If you get that onto your uniform, you won’t be able to remove the stains ever again.”

For this printing press, we don’t need to hand-ink the composition. Instead, we put the ink onto the rollers of the printing press and can print our stamps. Oh, they are wonderful, aren’t they? While the ink is drying, we have some snack and listen to Michael, who tells us more about printing history.

“Gutenberg’s invention initiated meaningful social developments. Through the mass printing of texts, knowledge, information and opinions could suddenly be spread much easier, more widely and without the control of state and church. Just like today with the internet, many more people were able to access knowledge or publish their own texts through the printing press than ever before.”

Enlightening! We never thought about all that.

Our prints are dry now. But something’s missing. Our stamps cannot be taken apart from each other. So more accurate work is needed for perforating our stamps with a vintage perforating machine.

Done! Now we can send out postcards with our own decorative stamps in addition to the normal postage.

Nowadays, most printed matters are being produced with offset or laser printing technologies. We enjoyed our visit to the museum printing office with all those fascinating machines, strange sounds and odors.

Thank you Michael, we love our stamps. What’s next? “Let’s grab some ice cream and enjoy the evening on the banks of the river Weser.” A great suggestion, Michael!

Information: Michael decided to commit his collection to the public, and now the newly founded association Museumsdruckerei Hoya “Zwiebelfisch” is responsible for running the place. Speicher3 and Reisegern are members of the association. The museum’s website (in German) is www.museumsdruckerei-hoya.de, and you can also find it on Facebook: Museumsdruckerei Hoya (no login required!).

Our huge thank you to Claas, Christine and Michael, for this fantastic tour and giveaway! The Museum is opening today again after a long break, and we’re excited to see this beautiful collection be shared with the public, so that people can learn from it and make beautiful things. Hurray!

Reisegern and Speicher3 would like to give away five of the stamp sheets* that were printed with the Little Mail Carriers to the readers of the Postcrossing Blog. If you’d like to win one of these, leave a comment below sharing a memory concerning letterpress machines, suggesting what the next thing we should print should be or what we should write about on our website! The giveaway will run for a week, and Paulo’s random number generator will select five winners by this time next Saturday. Good luck!

(*) Please note that these are Cinderella stamps and cannot be used for postage on your outgoing mail.

This is one of those posts in which we’re jealous of the Little Mail Carriers, because they’re doing all the cool things in our bucket list… 🙄

Some time ago, Cathy (aka beesknees) offered to take them on a visit to the Space Center in Houston, and who could refuse an invitation like that?! The little ones couldn’t get on a padded envelope fast enough in their eagerness to get to Texas! I’m sure you’re just as curious as we were to know about their trip, so here they are to tell us about that adventure.

Hello from Houston… or as they say it around here, howdy! 👋 We’re super excited for today’s visit, and to show you all the rockets and cool things happening here at the Space Center.

But first, a bit of explaining. The Space Center Houston is the visiting center of the NASA Johnson Space Center (or JSC for short), where human spaceflight training, research, and flight control are conducted. The JSC was built in 1961, and named after the late US president and Texas native, Lyndon B. Johnson, and has been running for over six decades now. When Neil Armstrong said “Houston, the eagle has landed” in 1969, or when Apollo 13 astronauts famously said "Houston, we have a problem" — this is the Houston they were referring to!

So the Space Center is a bit like a museum to showcase all the history and cool stuff that happened (and is still happening!) at the JSC, and we’re eager to explore everything. Even before you enter the building, there’s neat things to see!

Check out this amazing replica of Space Shuttle Independence, sitting on top of the original Shuttle Carrier Aircraft 905! Because shuttles don’t land in the same place where they take off from, carriers are needed to bring them back. Carriers start out as normal Boeing 747 planes, but they are modified to transport shuttles on top of them. A plane carrying a plane on its back! 🤯

Around the appropriately named “Rocket Park”, you can also see other rockets, like the Mercury-Redstone Launch Vehicle, Little Joe II…

… or Saturn V, a “super heavy-lift launch vehicle” (aka the big part that spews fire and sends things into orbit)! It’s hard to convey how massive this thing is. In fact, it is the tallest, heaviest and most powerful rocket used to send humans into space and was regularly used during the Apollo moon program. It has three parts (or stages) that separate at different times, and although the bits here at the Space Center did not make it into space, they were definitely ready to!

Right, it’s time to go see the exhibitions, learn about the different space missions and meet some astronauts inside.

Here are astronauts Shannon Walker from the USA, and Soichi Noguchi from Japan. They have both been in several missions to space, using different kinds of spacecrafts — including the Dragon 2 capsule for the SpaceX Crew-1 mission. Mr. Noguchi retired this year and is now the honorary director of the CupNoodles Museum. Honestly, we’re a bit jealous of him because how seriously cool is that for a career pivot!

One thing you can explore in the museum are the high-tech spacesuits that several astronauts wore on their missions, and how these have changed over the years. And you can also check out the inside of a command module, which is the control center and living quarters for most of the lunar missions. It looks quite tight for the humans in there, but I think it would be plenty of space for us.

We were especially intrigued by the red planet and the missions that made it there! Feeling the textures of a real Mars rock on our feet was a unique experience. Do you think humans will make it to Mars soon? We hope so… then perhaps we can slip into someone’s pocket, and have an adventure in space!

Because the museum is right in the Johnson Space Center, you can see actual space things happening there — like astronauts training in simulators, or the real Mission Control room monitoring astronauts in the International Space Station. Just… wow!

Before leaving, there was still time to salute Sally Ride, the first American woman in space. USPS has issued a stamp in her honor, and we used it to stamp our little passport. We also added a pressed penny from the Space Center, and browsed the postcards on the gift shop on our way out.

And so our visit has come to its end, and we’re a little sad to go… There’s so much to see and learn here at the Space Center in Houston, and we really hope y’all will be able to visit someday!

Our huge thank you to Cathy for taking the little guys on this grand adventure! I wonder where they will end up next… 🤔

Did you know that there is such a thing as a Pony Express Museum? The Little Mail Carriers heard about it and wouldn’t stop badgering us to go… so when Duane (aka DuaneThePhilatelist) offered to take them for a visit, they jumped on an envelope and off they went. Here they are, to tell you all the story of that adventure.

Hello from a sunny St. Joseph, Missouri! We’re super excited to be taking a special tour of the Pony Express Museum today, and hopefully will learn a lot about this unique way mail was delivered back in 1860. The museum is actually inside a part of the Pike’s Peak Stables, from which westbound Pony Express riders set out on their journey — how cool!

The Pony Express was a short-lived mail service that delivered newspapers, letters, telegrams as well as government and commercial mail using riders on horses across the United States, between St. Joseph in Missouri and Sacramento in California. Here is a superb map of their route, which you can see in great detail on Wikipedia:

Why was there a need for this service though? Well, back in 1848, gold was found in California, and a lot of people rushed there in search of the opportunities it brought. California was a new state at the time, and its population was growing fast, so there was a lot of demand to connect the west coast with the rest of the country.

At the time, the Central Overland California and Pikes Peak Express Company ran a stagecoach service between Kansas and Missouri, and they thought that starting an express service could perhaps earn them a more lucrative contract with the United States government. So the Pony Express was launched on April 3, 1860, when two riders left from the opposite ends of the route, and completed their journeys of 1800 miles (or 2896 kms) in 10 days — an amazing feat that many thought would not be possible!

The Pony Express recruitment announcements were infamous for asking for young, skinny men, and stating that orphans were preferred. Although the payment was high for the time, the journey through the country was perilous, as there were often ambushes and raids. Some riders were killed and many horses stolen or driven off in the Pauite War with the Pauite Indian tribe, whose territory the route crossed. The Pony Express was forced to temporarily suspend its services due to the conflict, and some mail was lost.

Because this was an express service and the journey had to be super fast, riders could not carry a lot of mail with them. To make changing horses quick at relay stations, a special saddle cover (called a mochila) was crafted, which had four mail pouches (or cantinas) on each corner. Mail had to fit in these small pouches, so that the riders could be quick!

One of the most famous Pony Express riders was William Cody… aka Buffalo Bill! He began working for the Pony Express at age 15 and is said to have completed the longest ride, covering 322 miles (518 km) in 21 hours and 40 minutes, using 21 horses. His adventures were immortalised (and are said to have been greatly exaggerated) in a novel that launched him into the spotlight. Many more books and movies were made about his adventures, in which he often wore a “cowboy” hat.

Mail carried by the Pony Express riders had its own cancellation mark, and in the museum you get the opportunity to sort the mail yourself. Postal work is hard, and we were exhausted…

The Pony Express never managed to secure that government contract their founders had hoped for, and became bankrupt after 18 months, closing on October 26, 1861 — just 2 days after the first transcontinental telegraph started its operations. Despite having run for only a short period of time, the service is immortalised in the tales of the American West, and the original route is even a national historical trail that crosses 8 states.

And that’s it for our wonderful visit to the Pony Express Museum — we are off to explore a bit more, and hope you all have the opportunity to visit someday!

And a big thank you to Duane, for hosting the Little Mail Carriers and showing them around the museum! 😀 Who knows where the little ones are off to next… keep an eye on the blog for their future adventures!