Tuesday, February 16, 2010

Exchange n.5, Slovakia and former USSR states

With some days of delay I add to my blog the scans of the nice stamps I got the past friday from my trading-partner Bohus from Kosice, Slovakia. This time I exchanged with Bohus my duplicates from Lithuania, Bosnia-Hercegovina, Kosovo, Serbia for recent used stamps from Slovakia, Czech Republic and former USSR states. This was a wantlist-based excgange.
Bohus' letter was very interesting and full of nice stamps from countries I can hardly found here in Italy. I selected few of them to be posted here. The first image shows some Slovakia commemoratives enclosed in the letter.
The definitives from Ukraine are always complicate to classify, since they were often issued twice per year without modification in the vignette but adding a roman numerals beside the year of issue to distinguish among the different series (i.e. 2007 designates the first issues of 2007, whilst 2007 II indicates the second issues). In any case, they are clearly more attractive than definitives from other countries.
Finally, in the third image definitives from Belarus, Russia and Adzerbaijan are shown. Belarus flower and wildlife definitives are very nice, but it's very hard to find them in postally used conditions (5 stamps out of 8 in the scan are CTOs). Russia wildlife 2008 definitive set in much more easy to find, even if, in my opinion, they are not so attractive as Belarus stamps. Adzerbaijan definitives aren't particularly nice, but they are the first stamps from that country that I can put in my collection, so I think that they deserved a place here in my blog!

Tuesday, February 9, 2010

Exchange n.4, Denmark

In the beginning of the carnival week, I got a letter from my friend Karsten from Ringe, Denmark. Our trade-agreement is quite simple: I provide him worlwide used stamps of the past 4-5 years (all very fine used with round cancellation) and he send me stamps from my wantlists, generally Denmark, Greenland and the other Scandinavian countries. This time I received a nice lot of Danish commemoratives, that allowed me to fill the gap in my collection from 1992 up to 2005. Now I miss only 148 stamps to complete Denmark collection from 1851 up to 2009 (and all the 2010 issues).

Sunday, February 7, 2010

Exchange n.3, Bolivia

The first trade of February is a complete success! Today the postman delivered the letter that was sent some days ago from my new trading partner Fernando from Cochabamba, Bolivia. I received from Fernando a very nice lot of recent commemorative stamps from Bolivia (2000-2009), one of my favourite (but hard to find) countries. All the stamps are in perfect conditions and have a very clear round cancellation.
The scan shows the more recent issues that I found in the letter.