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| Back in 1933, Venezuela's post service was better |
And a new record was broken. The postcard was sent from a secondary city in Venezuela on 1 February 2011. It arrived in Paris on 15 July of the same year. International post arriving in Paris takes on average about two days to get to the average household anywhere in France. This means the card took about 5 months and 13 days to go from the post office in Venezuela to France. The postcard was supposedly sent by air mail. We hear all the time post gets lost for years in the US in France or Britain, but that is rather the exception. Venezuela's post service is getting more and more Bolivarian by the day.
Ten years ago the same postcard would take at most 2 weeks to go from Venezuela to any place in Europe. Now we are back to the times of the Colony when Alexander von Humboldt would send letters from a mission in Apure to his friends in Berlin and just hope for the best.
Some years ago I sent some pictures from Holland to Caracas, with Priority Mail, so I had to pay a lot extra. The envelope arrived in Caracas 4 months later. In the same year I sent more pictures. The man at the post office advised to send it with Priority Male, then it would arrive faster. I said: “No thanks” and sent it with normal post. It was a surprise that it arrived three weeks later!
ReplyDeleteHoi, V.R.
ReplyDeleteVenezuelan post is indeed a mystery. And have you tried the other side? Once recently a Dutch friend wanted to send some postcards to her family in Europe and she got into this post office, also in a secondary city. We were the only ones at that office. There were three employees and they all became busy with the work: one looked for the box with the stamps, the other was counting the cards, a third was trying to understand the booklet with the prices. My friend was really impressed. She said it looked like a film in slow motion. It also took a couple of months.
I used to send loads of letters to several European countries, from Spain to -back then- the Soviet Union and I used to get lots of post as well. The usual time decades ago was less than 2 weeks from Europe to a Venezuelan mailbox, about a month and a half to a normal Venezuelan house (thus, a month for the postman to find the house). Those were times.
I have sent many postcards to Venezuela during the last 4 years, none of them had arrived yet, Now a use DHL and pay £35 for just a letter but it arrives in 5 days. We venezuelans have to pay an invisible tax for the goverment's corruption.
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