Post office

You can send and receive mail through a post. If you call at a post office or the General Post Office (G.P.O.) you‘ll see a number of windows with notices in big letters showing the operations handled and you’ll see the post office clerks behind the counters. The windows are marked, “Stamps”, “Postcards”, “Envelopes”, “registered Letters”, “Air Mail”, “Telegrams”, “Book Post” and others.

In England you can buy stamps at the post office or from a mall automatic machine by the side of a pillar-box, a round red letter-box standing in the corner of the street. There are two kinds of a stamp – the first class and the second class. First class letters are more expensive and quicker. They usually arrive with the first delivery next morning. Second class letters are cheaper but they are slower. If you are in a hurry and have no stamps at the moment, that does not keep you from sending a letter. Just mark it “Collect” and the addressee pays the postage. As a matter of fact, there is no need even to mark it “Collect”, for if there isn’t enough postage paid or no stamp at all, it’s always the addressee who pays the postage.

When sending a letter to a foreign country you should know the postage on a letter to a particular country and you may ask the clerk: ”What is the postage on this letter to France (Italy, Russia), please?” After having written an address on the envelope you drop your letter in the post box (pillar box). By the way, all post boxes in Britain are painted red, and all postmen wear dark blue. If you are sending a letter of particular value, you may send this letter by registered mail. In this case you have to fill in (A.E. – out) a form. The sender may be given a receipt or a return receipt. A return receipt is a receipt signed by the addressee when he receives a registered letter. So the sender can always trace the letter.

At the Poste Restante (A.E. – General Delivery) window they keep mail until called for. You can have mail sent to you by Poste Restante in any town and you should pick up your mail at the post office. In this case you must produce your indentification card or any document with your picture.

To send and receive mail in Britain and the USA you need to use a proper mailing address, which includes the full name of the addressee, a street address ( a house number and street name), city, state, zip code, country. In the USA the addressee’s address is usually written below at the center of the envelope. They write the sender’s address in the top left corner. In Britain they sometimes write the sender’s address on the back of the envelope.

The most famous stamp. It was in 1856. The Postmaster Of British Guiana was in a difficulty. He had used all the stamps, and new stamps, which they usually got from London, did not arrive yet. He did not know what to do. But then he found a way out: he asked a local printer to make some stamps which he used until the new ones arrived. Seventeen years later, a schoolboy who lived in British Guiana noticed on an envelope of old letters a strange stamp. It was dirty but the boy liked it and added it to his collection.

Some time later he showed his stamp to a well-known collector. This man gave him six shillings for stamp. The boy took it for he hoped to find another stamp among those old letters. But he did not find it. That one which the boy had sold became the most famous of all the world’s stamps. The stamp collector who bought it for six shillings did not know how valuable it was. Some years later he sold the stamp. The man who had bought it later sold it in Paris to Philip von Terrary who had the greatest stamp collection in the world. The stamp was in a poor state. But Philip von Terrary was very proud to have it, because he knew it was unique. Philip von Terrary died in 1917 and the stamp was offered for sale. It was bought for 7.343 pounds by a collector from the United States of America.