Stamps

In the summer, my uncle’s stamp collection was the best inspiration for me. We visited Toronto, Canada for our family vacation. My uncle showed me a lot of stamps. The stamps were all beautiful and precious. He had stamps from lots of countries and very old ones too. Some were so old that they were made back in the eighteenth century. My uncle had some duplicate stamps, so he gave them to me. The most interesting stamps were the ones with real gold. Some of the gold stamps were from China. The Chinese stamp had a golden dragon to represent the dragon year.

The ones that were really beautiful were the ones with paintings. My uncle even had the stamp with a painting of Mona Lisa! I saw this painting in the Louvre Museum in France two years ago. I just had one look at the picture; it would be cool to have the stamp so that I could look at the famous painting anytime I want. Most of the painting stamps were from Russia. The Russian stamps also had information beside the stamp, but it was all written in Russian.

There were lots of different varieties. Some were ones with buildings; some were with flowers, animals, ships, etc. Some even had connected stamps that all belonged into one picture. For example, one of the Chinese stamps had four stamps connected to form a picture. Some other stamps had no teeth on their sides. My uncle said that the ones with no teeth had more value than ones with teeth. He had more than 6 albums, and all of them were filled! My dad said that he spent a lot of his time and money on stamps.

My uncle also had stamps of many countries in his collection. He had some stamps from Canada, America, and even countries like the British Virgin Islands. He gave me some stamps from Canada, Indonesia, and Hong Kong. He showed me some Vietnam and Thailand stamps. They both had very fancy designs. The Thai stamps mostly had the portrait of their king. The Vietnam stamps were all different, but all the stamps were colorful.

To tell the different values, my uncle brought along his stamp catalog. We looked at some stamps in the catalog and found the real ones in his album. My uncle showed one bird stamp he had and we searched for its price. Originally, my uncle bought the stamp at around $20. The price now turned out to be $79.95, which was an interesting investment.

After the vacation I had my own album with my own stamps to keep. My uncle gave me some stamps, but I still needed more, so my mom helped me to get new stamps too. We found some used stamps on envelopes. Then we cut around the stamp. Next, we washed the envelope part off and dried the stamps. We flattened the stamps in a book and we put them in my album. Now I have a great stamp collection too.