Thank you for following!

Two songs came into my mind when opening my mailbox to find this pretty postcard. "If you walk away walk away (...) I will follow", a song from my teens, and "I, I follow", from more present times.

But behind it was a different meaning: a dear person is following me! On instagram, that is :-)

The postcard has been designed by Frankfurt-based typographer Harald Geisler.

On the back some beautiful stamps:



Thank you so much, Eva, for both following me and for making my days with such great mail!
(er, and I know, on my turn I should start a twitter account now...?!)

In: from Morocco and Cadiz

Camels in Morocco and Kuifje and Captain Haddock visiting Cadis/Cádiz.



I was happy to receive both postcards, along with beautiful stamps, sent from different countries. Thank you very much, moltes gràcies, Eva!

Sunday Stamps: 'H' is for haai and haan

Today's Sunday Stamps is about the letter 'H'.

First I'll share this stamp, showing a haai:



Guessed right! 'Haai' means 'shark'. The Dutch word 'Haai' is pronounced as a kind of loooong 'Hi!'. And although most Dutch don't say 'hi' as a greeting (instead we say 'hoi' or 'hallo', plus some more formal words), there is some silly joke about the word haai, the 'haai!... walvis!' joke. One person saying 'haai!', in the meaning of 'hello!'. The other person hears a long 'hi' in it, thinking the first person says 'shark', thus replies 'whale'.


From haai to haan it is just one letter. The amount of stamps I can share here, showing hanen (plural of 'haan'), however, is a lot larger than the amount of haai stamps in my collection. The reason is that this year is the Jaar van de Haan, the Year of the Rooster, and I happened to have been involved in several chaincards on this theme.

So here's a variety of stamps about the hen's husband, the haan (rooster).
The first card has traveled within Europe and arrived back home with haan stamps from Serbia, Ukraine, Estonia and of course my own country:



And this card traveled through eight, mainly Asian, countries during seven and half month, to finally return home, with stamps from China, Taiwan, Korea, Malaysia, Singapore, Canada, the USA and the Netherlands:



and a bonus postmark from Malaysia on the back:



The Korean stamp is a nice, shiny one. You can't see it on the scanned card above, but I happened to have made photo of other people's cards, before I forwarded those cards to the next receiver, and you can see two shiny hanen on these stamps:







Finally, on bottom, a UN stamp showing a haan:



Curious to see other 'H' stamps? Please check today's Sunday Stamps and the links mentioned there!

In: from Greece

The Greek island of Ikaria has a special nature, Eva wrote on the back of this postcard. Seeing this card, I think she is right, and it is hard to 'catch' the beauty in one postcard. However, the real version of this card comes close :-)



On the back Eva added a beautiful stamp, I think of one of the deer statues in the harbour of an other wellknown island, Rhodos.

Thank you very much, moltes gràcies, Eva!

In: from the United Kingdom

Just this morning I realised that this postcard would have matched very well with the postcards shown in the recent Postcards for the Weekend. The weekend is over now, but during the working week nice things happen, which, at least in the Netherlands, don't happen in the weekends. For example this emptying of the mailbox, the daily pick-up of our sent mail.

Great photo, taken by John and made into a postcard, which I am very pleased to receive.

On the back pretty stamps:



Thank you very much, John!

Postcards for the Weekend: Mail / Postal

This weekend Postcards for the Weekend's theme is a dear one: mail / postal.

As mail lovers nowadays often correspondent with other mail lovers, it may be clear that mail related postcards are welcome objects to send and receive. This way I received (and have send) several great postcards, matching to the theme.
Here are a few of them:

An interesting postcard sent by Eva:



Mail transport (one way to do so) on a postcard from John:



Some good advice (at least for me, who is much behind in replying to many kind senders): send your mail in time (postcard sent in time by John):



A mail art postcard, created and sent by FinnBadger:



And a postcard, made of a photo I took years ago:



See more mail related / postal postcards at and via this weekend's Postcards for the Weekend!

Sunday Stamps: 'G' is for gebouw, geschiedenis and grappig.

Today's Sunday Stamps is dedicated to the letter 'G'.

Gisteren (= yesterday) I happened to have received a special, 3D mail art elephant. One of the coming days I'll post it on my animals mail art blog. But there is a reason to share some part of it here today with you: two stamps showing a 'gebouw' (building; 'bouwen' means 'to built').

When receiving this piece of mail art I was immediately attracted by this gebouw:



Not because of the gebouw (building) itself, but because of the name. In my twenties I loved to listen to so-called new wave music, and the band 'Bauhaus' had a song I really liked. Later in life I learned about the art movement 'Bauhaus', including architecture. But seeing this stamp made me think of my own geschiedenis (= history) and I was pleased to welcome this gebouw-stamp.

On this piece of mail art there was an other stamp showing a gebouw, which happens to be a galerie (not to be confused with a galerij), namely the Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart, Germany.



(It was impossible to put the 3D mail art object in my scanner, so I hope that these photos will do.)


The following stamp sheets depict the geschiedenis (history) of Spain in a grappige (funny) way.
Although geschiedenis is no grap (grapje, joke in English), and although it is a sad fact that people don't seem to learn from history and invent bad wheels again and again, and despite of some of the cartoons making me sad because of the depiction of disgusting deeds, I think this 'light' way of sharing historical facts is a good one. Maybe people will learn easier from images than from spoken or written facts.






(By the way: the English word for 'grap(je)', 'joke', has a false friend, too. In Dutch Joke (written the same way, but pronounced 'yoe-ke') is a normal, not necessarily funny, girl's name!)

See more stamps on the letter 'G' at and via today's Sunday Stamps!

Sunday stamps: 'F' is for film and fotografie

Today it is the letter 'F''s turn.

Fotografie looks and sounds a little similar to photography. Be it that in the word 'fotografie' the accent falls on the '-fie' and not on the '-to-', as I have learned that's the case with the English word 'photography'. The meaning of both words is exactly the same.
Filmmaker only differs in pronounciation of the 'a' to the 'a' in the English equivalent, filmmaker.



Heinz Sielmann was a German filmmaker and fotograaf (photographer). He created beautiful wildlife films (movies) and foto's (pictures). See some of his work via this website.

Sunday stamps: 'E' is for 'Ei'

In Dutch, the word 'ei' (which means 'egg') is pronounced exactly the same as the Dutch letter combination 'ij'. I tried to find a similar sound in English but I failed. Fortunately the online translator this time says it rather correct (click the loud speaker below of the word 'ei' at this link). Do you know words in English with the same sound?

Stamps about eieren (= ei plural) are rare, as far as I know. So I was very lucky when Eva sent me this special one from Spain:



And suddenly I remembered having received an other egg stamp, already two years ago, from Natalie from Hong Kong:



See more stamps on the letter 'E' at and via Sunday stamps!