A letter-posting adventure

The little post office in the village let us send our Christmas cards okay, but wouldn't take my Mum's birthday present (something about it being too expensive(?!) - we never quite worked out what the problem was...), so it had to be taken to the main office in the next big town:



















Here is the most excellent sign that greets you as you enter:



















Passing beneath this ambitious declaration you enter a large hall with a huge counter stretching around you on 3 sides. The counter has at least a dozen different service points, each labelled for a different purpose - stamps, letters, parcels, tax payments, gas bill payments, earthquake payments*, etc, etc.

At the counter you don't queue so much as generally barge in to whatever's happening at the time (thankfully it was pretty quiet when we were there, or I don't think we would have managed!). Behind the counter are lots of men, at least two-thirds of them drinking tea or generally not doing anything visibly useful.

After visiting at least three of the windows and flagging down one or two of the idle men, we had to go and find a quiet corner somewhere to apply the stupendous number of stamps required to get the parcel to its destination.

Behold:



















And that's just one side of the parcel! Apparently the largest denomination of stamp they have is Rs25** - around 19p.

The letters get posted into the appropriate box in the spectrum of colours below, and the parcel gets handed to yet another disturbed-from-not-doing-much little man behind yet another counter.

I hope it arrives okay...



















(*We think payments out to earthquake victims, rather than payments for the services of earthquakes. Still, you never know.)

(**I'm sure I've seen Rs30 ones, but apparently not on this day.)