Snail Mail

A week ago I criticized the United States Postal Service for taking 44 days to deliver a small package to my cousins in Switzerland.  Now it's my turn to take aim at the Mexican Postal Service.  Of course this is not the first time that I have written negatively about that institution that has devolved into a mass of inefficiency.  

I can remember almost fifty years ago when I was a college student studying in Mexico during the winter quarter of my junior year.  Letters that my parents sent me and that I sent back home would arrive in a relatively timely fashion.  I was only down there for ten weeks, but an exchange of correspondence back and forth was possible.  Sometime during those intervening decades the postal service became incredibly slow.  

I have previously mentioned here fellow blogger Gary Denness, an Englishman who lived for a number of years in Mexico City.  (A link to his blog "The Mexile" appears on my blog list in the right hand margin.) When I was in Mexico on my latest trip I sent him a postcard from the main post office in Mexico City just to see how long it would take.  At the time, I wrote about it on this blog.

Gary informed me that the postcard had finally arrived at his home in England on Tuesday of this week.  From the time I sent it in late April, it took seventy seven days to be delivered... and I think we be quite sure that the delay is not the fault of the British postal service.

So that means that if I were studying for ten weeks in Mexico nowadays, I would quite possibly be back home before any snail mail would arrive at its destination.  Looking at it another way, back in colonial times it took the Spanish galleons two to three months to sail from Spain to Mexico... about the same time it took for that postcard to cross the ocean.  Thank goodness we have email.

Alejandro's young nephew enjoys receiving mail, so yesterday I sent him another postcard.  I'm willing to bet money that it will not arrive before I return to Mexico on August 5th!