Meeting Announcements of the Busan Philatelic Club, Korea

renden, this is all I have of this correspondence but I do have a few more fdcs and other covers I can post at some point. I also was thinking about starting a Korean postal cards thread at some point as I have a number of these as well.

I worked at the Paradise Beach Hotel in Busan and all of them are to the same address though a couple of them exclude the name of the hotel and only include the P.O. Box and then others have variant spellings of my name, either fully spelled out in Korean or only my surname plus honorific. In the case of the first, hand-written announcement, this was for our annual banquet, though the person spelled my last name incorrrectly and in that case as well, did not include the hotel name, only the P.O. Box.

The calligraphy on that first cover is very nice!

Ryan

Philatarium, they are express mail stickers. In small Korean script underneath each symbol it states, 빠른우편, or express mail.  On one sticker there is the number "1" and on the other there is the Korean letter, "우" which is pronounced "oo" and is also the universal symbol for mail or post office. You can sometimes see it on post office doors or on other postally related materials in Korea. Many words related to stamps or postal matters will begin with this letter. For example, 우편 = mail, 우편 열차 = mail train, 우체국 = post office, and, of course, 우표 = stamp.

What I don't understand is why one blue sticker has the number 1 and the other has 우, since both of them do the same job, express mail. My guess is that it further designates a postal zone or a different express status.

Nice to see covers with Korean script, Darrin, especially with stamps on!

I lived/worked in Korea for a year 2000/2001 and was based with the RoKAF at Seosan near the West coast.

I hardly ever saw covers with stamps, but I started an account with Korea post through the post office on the base, and I soon ended up with sheets of every issues, souvenir sheets and year-books. I also had gifts of stamps, FDCs and other ephemera from Air Force personnel.

Unfortunately the road system from Seosan to the capital back then was such that I was rarely able to escape to Seoul to explore stamp dealers, even if I had known where to go. The Shilla hotel, where I stayed on the way out to, or back from, UK trips had a (expensive) gift shop with stamp sets, so that helped to expand my collection.

I was so pleased to get an indecipherable Korean cover with a stamp on, that I showed it to the squadron Warrant Officer, who said "Why you pleased - is parking ticket!". He was unhappy, because that meant detailing an NCO to go with me to sort it out.
Koreans could pay direct debit through their phones but I had no such facility so a personal visit was required, with (almost always) consequential VIP treatment and much practicing of English by all involved! ("Oh, English gentleman!")

I was intrigued by the pot of glue always to be found on the counter in Korean Post Offices - apparently the high humidity during part of the year meant possible loosening or detachment, hence the glue.

Here are two covers that I sent home during a "pre-posting" visit (stamps procured and attached by the hotel receptionist):