For the month of August, it was free entry for us to the various museums in Singapore! We went to the stamp museum. The official name is the Singapore Philatelic Museum but really, it’s easier to just say stamp museum. It’s near City Hall MRT and you can just walk within 10 minutes from the station
Once you enter the place, you realize half of the space or rather, â…” of it was a stamp collector’s store in the main lobby! The â…“ was pretty much the ticketing area (and also where you paid for your merchandise).
I asked the others, “Hey, there’s a snail there! Why is their mascot thing a snail?” and they all promptly replied, “Snail mail!”.
Well, that was pretty cute.
We signed in their guest book of sorts for our free entry and got our ticket sticker to put on our shirts! Why yes, it is as small as a real stamp too.
You could take pictures but only without flash and none where the sign of “no picture taking” was around. Mostly for those bits were due to the copyright of the artist. Meanwhile, we learned a lot of stamp terms!
Also, back in WW2 and before that, stamps were also a sign of showing which country conquered which! It’s like to decrease the morale of the troops or something to see your letter being stamped with “liquidation of empire” or in the language of whoever won the territory. There were also imitation stamps that tried to overcome the price of postage!
Alternative stamps with special features were also in the collection there. One of it was the Bhutanese record stamps. Yes, those circular things are stamps and they had folk songs on it. I don’t know how you use them for a letter if so besides just keeping it for a collection. You can see some of the other stamps since Jo posted it here.
For a stamp museum, we spent quite a lot of time in it. It had the old post motorbikes and even the post boxes through the ages!
There is so much to see and learn about that I’m not going to post everything here cause really, it’s so much! You wouldn’t think a little building like that had a lot of stuff. It is like it is bigger on the inside or something. There were tools and also uniforms of the postmen of the past. An archival of Singapore stamps lies in the cabinet there and within the glass, you might find the stamps of any year you like!
There were other exhibits there (although it is still mainly about stamps), this non-permanent one is about Dr Sun Yat Sen.
There’s one about communication and it’ll be here until March 2012. In any case, you can check online to see what other exhibits the museum is having.
What are these holes in the “field”? OHO! They are rabbit hutches! Haha whoever did this exhibit for Bunny Wonderland (due to the year of the rabbit), it’s clever since we all thought that they were real tunnels! (In actual fact, they used mirrors but woah, we didn’t notice that until we looked really closely!).
Apparently postcards from all around the world is sent to the museum? The director or at least someone who works there it seems! We got to see the various stamps and bunnies from different countries with this! I wonder if there’s a call for it from other stamp museums to send postcards too, like an exchange of sorts.
I must say the world bunny in Icelandic is pretty interesting.
I guess most of our time was also spent in the store! The main store of it has some of the rare stamps for sale. One of the Penny Black stamps costs around $750 if I remember right. We didn’t buy that of course. What I got from the store was a stamp album! They have the fancy nice ones compared to the pretty default ones that are in bookstores. It is totally worth it to buy your stamp gear from the museum.
Oh, if you come to the museum when postage deliveries are available, you can get the special date stamp chopped on your letter or postcard before it gets sent off to anywhere.
MEANWHILE:
Hey guys, see the picture on the right above my Latest Topics? It’ll be there until the end of 2011. Help vote for me to be the NE Mation Ambassador! I’ll post more on this tomorrow but for now, click the NE Mation page and like it on FB here: http://www.facebook.com/nemation and then click vote for Seriously Sarah on the direct link here. Or you know, you can click on the picture above too, to just get to it!
