Monument to the founders of Odessa

Postcard ID: UA-906552
Country: Ukraine

I like Odessa. I visited this city summer 2012. Sea, sun and relax were my friends :)

From Chisinau (hometown of my husband) to Odessa is 4 hours by train or bus! Although there are Moldavian and Ukrainian border (and even Transdniestrian border in case train).

This card shows the monument to Catherine the Great and her companions - José de Ribas, Franz P. de Vollan, Grigory Potemkin and Platon Zubov. The monument is located in Odessa on Catherine square. It is placed in 1900. In 1920 the monument was dismantled and and restored only in 2007.

Here is one more from amazing Ukranian stamps:

The Commonwealth of Massachusetts

Postcard ID: US-2576687
Country: USA

Hurray! This is one more map of USA state! So love it :) Here in Minsk I have a shirt with inscription "Massachusetts", so I have special love to this state :)

Nickname: Bay state

Capital: Boston

From the quite Berkshire Hills, through bustling Boston, to the sands of Cape Cod, Massachusetts is a vacationer's paradise. The state has interesting historic sites, well kept woodland parks and ocean beaches, superb museums, fine hospitals and universities, excellent restaurants and always more to see and do than almost anyplace else.

Great description! Here are some more amazing stamps:

Maryinsky Palace, Kyiv

Postcard ID: UA-901838
Country: Ukraine

Kyiv is really nice and beautiful city. I hope that now revolutionaries did not hurt and destroy its beautiful buildings.

Mariyinsky Palace is the official ceremonial residence of the President of Ukraine in Kiev and adjoins the neo-classical building of the Verkhovna Rada (parliament) of Ukraine. It is a Baroque palace on the hilly bank of the Dnieper River.

The palace was ordered to be constructed in 1744 by the Russian Empress Elizaveta Petrovna, and was designed by Bartolomeo Rastrelli, the most famous architect working in the Russian Empire at that time. One of the students of Rastrelli, Ivan Michurin, together with a group of other architects, completed the palace in 1752. Empress Elizabeth, however, did not live long enough to see the palace. The first royal figure to stay in the palace was Empress Catherine II, who visited Kiev in 1787. In the late 18th and early 19th centuries the palace was the main residence of Governors-General.

In the early 19th century, the palace burned down in a series of fires. Roughly half a century later, in 1870, Alexander II of Russia had the palace reconstructed by the architect Konstantin Mayevsky, using old drawings and watercolours as guide. It was then renamed after the reigning Empress Maria Alexandrovna. By her wish, a large park was established off the southern side of the palace. The palace was used as a residence for visiting members of the imperial family until 1917.

During the years of the Russian Civil War in 1917-20, the palace was used as the Kiev revkom headquarters, particularly during the Kiev Bolshevik Uprising. In the 1920s the building belonged to an agricultural school, soon after which it became a museum. The Mariyinsky was badly damaged in World War II, and restored at the end of the 1940s. Another major restoration was completed in the early 1980s.

Here are amazing stamps with symbols of Ukraine:

Penang Island, Malaysia

Postcard ID: MY-180707
Country: Malaysia

Captain Francis Light founded Penang Island as a British settlement on the 11th August 1786. His monument stands in the grounds of the Penang Museum and Art Gallery

On 7 July 2008, George Town, the historic capital of Penang, was formally inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site alongside with Malacca. It is officially recognized as having a unique architectural and cultural townscape without parallel anywhere in East and Southeast Asia.

Here are postal stamps from this card:

Cute Christmas card

Postcard ID: NL-2220854
Country: Netherlands

This nice and warm card was sent to me by Reina. She is engaged in ice-speedskating and even was in Minsk!

I like people that like my country and I like this card :)

Here is the stamp from the envelope:

Painted by Jan jr. Voerman

Postcard ID: DE-2628800
Country: Germany

It's so interesting to receive postcard from Germany in Russian :) Thank you, Ana!
And also you can see here my favourite butterflies :)

Jan Voerman Junior was born in 1890 in the Dutch village of Hattem, as the son of painter Jan Voerman Senior. Voerman Jr. was taught painting by his father at an early age. As a young boy he was fascinated by the world of animals, plants and insects, and he collected shells and beetles to compose his own still lifes. He would study and observe these objects to become well-acquainted with rendering a perfect image from nature. He was also an apprentice at the Amsterdam Academy and the Academy in The Hague. Voerman Jr. received his first commissioned assignment when he was 15 years old. He was asked to make the illustrations for the well-known Dutch Verkade nature albums, which he did for many years. The Second World War ended this cooperation. From 1939 onwards, he focused exclusively on painting in oil. Like in his Verkade illustrations, subjects from nature dominate the scenes in Voerman’s paintings: landscapes and still lifes with plants and flowers. He would study these items carefully, which is shown in his precisely rendered paintings. 

Chinese Poem

Postcard ID: CN-1122099
Country: China

A sender wrote me on the back side of this card: "This is a poem from my country - China. Hope you like it!". I like look of this card, however I have no idea about the sense of this poem :)

Meanwhile there is interesting Chinese stamps:

The Imperial Palace

Postcard ID: CN-1126996
Country: China

From the back side of the card:

This is a view of the Forbidden City in Beijing. It was the Chinese Imperial Palace from the Ming Dynasty to the end of the Qing Dynasty and now houses the Palace Museum. For almost 500 years, it served as the home of emperors and their households. The Forbidden City was declared a World Heritage site in 1987 and it is listed by UNESCO as the largest collection of preserved ancient wooden structures in the world!

I really like this card as it;s beautiful, with really interesting history and has great decor:

Also there are nice stamps on the card and on envelope:

Winter cat. Oxana Zaika

Postcard ID: UA-886326
Country: Ukraine

This card is wonderful! I've fallen in love with it once I found it in my mailbox.

This beauty postcard is painted by Oxana Zaika.

Oxana was born in 1969, began to draw as a child. She graduated Art College in Moscow  after studying at the art school . In addition, she graduated later from iconography and batik courses. Currently Oxana  lives  in Lyon, France.  She draws everywhere and with different materials, depending on the circumstances. But lately, she prefer watercolor  more and more. Also Oxana participated in many exhibitions in Russia, Tunisia and France.

Greetings from Nebraska

Postcard ID: US-2535893
Country: USA

Nebraska is a state on the Great Plains of the Midwestern United States. Its state capital is Lincoln. Its largest city is Omaha, which is on the Missouri River.

The state is crossed by many historic trails, but it was the California Gold Rush that first brought large numbers of non-indigenous settlers to the area. Nebraska became a state in 1867.

There are wide variations between winter and summer temperatures, and violent thunderstorms and tornadoes are common. The state is characterized by treeless prairie, ideal for cattle-grazing, and it is a major producer of beef, as well as pork, corn, and soybeans.

Nebraska is the 9th least-densely populated state of the United States. Ethnically, the largest group of Nebraskans are German-American. The state also has the largest per capita population of Czech-Americans among U.S. states.

This snowman came to me with the card:

Also there are nice stamsp:

Alice in Wonderland

Postcard ID: UA-884893
Country: Ukraine

I think that this is absolutely amazing card. I like Alice in Wonderland like a book and films, so like all connected with it :)

Alice in Wonderland is an 1865 novel written by English author Charles Lutwidge Dodgson under the pseudonym Lewis Carroll. It tells of a girl named Alice who falls down a rabbit hole into a fantasy world populated by peculiar, anthropomorphic creatures. The tale plays with logic, giving the story lasting popularity with adults as well as with children. It is considered to be one of the best examples of the literary nonsense genre. Its narrative course and structure, characters and imagery have been enormously influential in both popular culture and literature, especially in the fantasy genre.

Also this card contains amazing post stamps:

Call cats correctly

Postcard ID: RU-2246045
Country: Russia

This beauitiful card was painted by Russian artist Victoria Kirdiy. The back side of the card contains a nice poem abot cats. It's a little difficult to translate it to English as we have formal and informal 'you' in Russian and so this poem says that we should address to cats only in formal way :)

The most important thing
Don't even try
To be on first name terms with a CAT
Because even the smallest
CAT is a CAT

Here are animals from the Russian stamps:

Greetings from Görlitz

Postcard ID: DE-2750823
Country: Germany

Görlitz is a town in Germany and the capital of district of Görlitz. It is the easternmost town in the country, located on the Lusatian Neisse River in the Bundesland (Federal State) of Saxony. It is opposite the Polish town of Zgorzelec, which was a part of Görlitz until 1945.

Historically, Görlitz was in the region of Upper Lusatia. However, in 1815, some parts of Lusatia were integrated into the Province of Silesia, and later into the Province of Lower Silesia. Görlitz is the largest city of the former Province of Lower Silesia that lies west of the Oder-Neisse line and hence remains in Germany today. Thus it is both the most Silesian city, in terms of character, and the largest, in Germany today. This is not unjustified since the city adapted to a large extent to the rest of Silesia when it was part of it administratively. The city combines Lusatian and Silesian traditions as well as German and Sorbian culture; since 1950 the town and its population have been influenced by the proximity to Poland, across the Oder-Neisse-line.

Due to the historical parts of the city, many movie-makers have used the various sites as backgrounds. Today the most prominent example is Quentin Tarantino who shot the movie-in-a-movie Pride of the Nation for Inglourious Basterds (which incidentally purports to be Sicily) on the Untermarkt and Obermarkt in Görlitz' oldest parts of the city. In addition The Reader teen years were shot in the town, rapid restoration work making the shoot difficult.

Here is the stamp from this card: