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!