Mail and Post Offices

We made our first trip to the post office here in the five years that we have been here.   

Yemen does not have residential postal service, you can’t get mail delivered to your home.  You can however get po boxes. I am not sure of the costs for these, but they are available.  You can stop by a post office for details.

Most post offices probably look like this:  (they are bright, you really can’t miss them).

 

If a post office box is not an option, you can receive packages/parcels via DHL. They are located (the Sana’a office) on Sharia Haddah, not too far past the Libyan Embassy (sifaarah libiyyah). I believe they are open 24 hours, with the exception of Ramadan, for which they have special hours.

 

Our trip to the post office was to mail a postcard to the US.  The cost was about 60 cents.  It was actually easier than I had thought. Some tourists ahead of us were mailing postcards too. I just showed the post card to the teller/cashier and told him where it was going to and he gave us the needed stamps. Then he took the postcard for mailing.

When we were in Egypt, it took a letter from my sister about 1 month to arrive from the states, through ordinary mail (bareed aadee), so I expect it will take around that long (or longer) for ordinary mail here, Allahu ilm….Nope, I was wrong. When I first wrote this post I had just mailed a postcard to California through bareed aadi  and has since it arrived and in about two weeks, masha Allah. So that was a surprise.