Monday, March 4, 2013

Cirque de Mafate, Réunion

No no, no worries! All is ok with your browser (even if you are using IE :)) You've landed to a new update indeed! Hard to believe, no?
Yeah, sorry for the lack of posts here in general...but i really haven't been in the right mood lately for postcards...well, haven't been in the right mood for anything...but this beautiful sunshine today, at the beginning of the week, told me that I have to warm up my keyboard a bit too...and, here we go with 5 fantastic cards that have arrived in my mailbox since the beginning of the year :)


And my first card comes from the king of travels, Mr. JP! And with this card, the number of countries in my collection has increased by one! Ok, actually, last year I received another Réunion card and I had it on the agenda to be posted....but this card beat it...coz of the postmark...and you'll see in a while, why :)

Prior to postcrossing, Réunion was one of those places on Earth that I have not heard of..and for those who are not familiar with this country yet, here is a brief summary:
it is one of the overseas departments of France, an island with a population of about 800,000 located in the Indian Ocean - somewhere between Madagascar and Mauritius.
On this particular card you can see the Cirque de Mafate, which is a caldera, formed from the collapse of the large shield volcano the Piton des Neiges.
Ive never heard of  'caldera' before, and google says that caldera is a cauldron-like volcanic feature usually formed by the collapse of land following a volcanic eruption. They are sometimes confused with volcanic craters. The word comes from Spanish caldera, and this from Latin CALDARIA, meaning "cooking pot". In some texts the English term cauldron is also used.
(I wonder if Felipe Calderón's name has some etymology in all this - I mean, politicians are always 'cooking' something for you)

and as i said, the turning point for choosing this Réunion card over the other one I have received is the postmark...coz on this one, apart from the usual French cancellation, you can see also two clear Réunion cancellations! I dont know how JP is getting these...just as I dont know why on the majority of the mail from the French overseas departments, I only get the usual French cancellation only...eh, figures...



as for the stamps...JP used two...the one on the left was issued in 1992, representing the International Bread Congress...the other stamp...now this turtle gave me real trouble...and in the end i lost my patience, so i still have no idea when it was issued...help?

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