Are you the modern kind of traveller just uploading photos to social media and sending them via messenger services to your beloved ones at home? Or are you a bit nostalgic and still sending postcards around the globe? I’m the latter kind and sending postcards is often quite a challenge these days as it becomes more and more unusual. At Kazakhstan, people will ask you directly why you intend to do such a stupid thing – tradition is the only accepted answer. At Kazakhstan, sending postcards is nowadays very uncommon and relatively costly (2200 Tenge per card!). But it is perfectly doable.
Buying postcards is the very first challenging step because you need to find a shop that sells them. If everything fails, try the shops of the bigger museums in town – they often have a small selection. Don’t write the adresses directly on the card, walk into a branch of KazPost (Казпочта) once you’ve written your texts. The cards then need to be individually put into envelopes provided by KazPost. On the envelope you need to write the recipients address but also your name with a local address, probably the one of the post office.
Write the addresses clearly in block letters. The reason for that is that the post office employee will have to put a barcode on the envelope and type sender and recipient addresses into his computer. Foreign names, streets and cities are already a challenge to them – unclearly written addresses will require a lot of discussion to get the postcards ready to go. After payment the postcards in their individual envelops directly stay at the post office and receive a stamp there. The letters arrived in Germany six days later and as KazPost sends them as registered mail, they are only handed out personally to the recipients; they are not just inserted into mail boxes.
Казпочта
Чунджа
Kazakhstan
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