How to send a postcard from Baghdad
Perhaps we’re a little old-fashioned but, really, who wouldn’t like to receive a postcard from Iraq?
If you have managed to find some postcards in Iraq, you’ll be wondering where to post them. Now there are a few postboxes dotted around Baghdad but we’re not sure if these are really in use, so we decided to send ours from the city’s main post office.
This is conveniently located opposite the entrance gates of the Iraqi National Museum. We say ‘conveniently’ because all taxi drivers know the location of the museum (muthaf متحف in Arabic). By contrast, asking for the post office (maktab il bareed مكتب البريد in Arabic) proved confusing for our taxi driver, whose attempts to use his sat nav merely took us to the train station. We eventually located it on a different map app and directed our taxi driver there. It’s much easier just to ask for the museum.
We had a friendly welcome from the security guard at the doors of the post office, who directed us towards one of several desks. If these are all busy, you can wait on chairs provided. The post office is fully-functional and in regular use. A staff member confirmed it was mostly used for sending parcels abroad (there were several customers busy taping up boxes when we arrived) or for sending official documents in-country.
Postcards seem to be more of a rarity. The lady who served us seemed initially perplexed by the postcards, and particularly concerned by the absence of envelopes. However, after checking with another staff member, she returned to confirm that we could indeed send postcards to Europe and we didn’t need envelopes.
The price was IQD1,000 per stamp for each postcard. The lady stuck the stamps on for us and took charge of the completed postcards.
It was an interesting little adventure and experiment. And, much as we hate to spoil the surprise, the postcards we sent did not get lost in the post and nor did they take an eternity to arrive.
But, where to find postcards?
Actually finding a postcard in Baghdad is a little trickier than sending one. So far, we have only found two sources of postcards, although admittedly we’ve only kept an eye out for them. One was the museum but only because we were meeting officials and were given a set of promo postcards, showing various Iraqi artefacts and heritage sites.
The other (very attractive) postcards we had found were in Zuqaq13, which has an outlet in the basement of the عمارة الجادرجي shopping centre, which is close to Babylon Mall in the Mansour District. This is also a great place for buying mementoes and gifts.
The only problem with Zuqaq13 postcards is that they have very limited space in which to write any message, as the address section takes up most of the postcard. The postcards we bought there were (to the best of our memories) IQD1,000 or IQD2,000 and each came with an envelope. The envelopes were mostly printed with the address of the store, so were fairly useless.
Zuqaq13 is also a fine place to buy locally-designed and made mementoes or presents - mainly t-shirts and tote bags with attractive and ever-changing designs. As always, we encourage tourists to support the local economy and enterprising young Iraqis by buying local products.
There may be some old postcards still available in Muttanabbi Street (Baghdad’s famous literary and book-buying centre) that we haven’t noticed and there may well be postcards available at other places across Baghdad that we have not yet found or noticed.
We’re hoping that Zuqaq13 will improve the layout on the back of theirs to enable the writing of messages, or that another enterprising Iraqi may soon make some modern ones, featuring some of Iraq’s many visual highlights.
