I’ve always been very curious, a child who couldn’t get enough of asking ‘Why?’. This endless search for knowing things moulds the character and the behaviour of a person. One of the strongest memories of my childhood was my stamps collection and the unorthodoxes ways I had to get new samples for it.

The fact of living in the country’s capital city made easier the contact with foreign people due to the proximity to the embassies and it was extactly at these places where I made friends who helped me create a stamps collection that would make one envy of it, specially coming from an 8 year old boy. I’ll say that this was like a port-of-entry (with no return) to the incessant curiosity about our world: distant countries, weird cultures and the urge to learn new languages.

But, how did I get to this theme: Philately?

One of these days my father was looking for a Magnifying glass then I remembered that I kept mine within the box with my stamps collection, long forgotten inside other boxes we keep carefully under the dust of many years in the atic.

The moment I found the box with my collection I felt myself like Indiana Jones (euphemisms aside, obviously) when he discovered the lost city of Atlantis (which he would only find on the 92 PC Game but that’s another story). It was there, my long lost 1980's precious treasure.

I took a few hours opening envelopes, exploring, rediscovering things that were there, untouched for at least 20 years. A Time travel, no doubt about it. It made me remember each time I went to the embassies, the meetings of the philately club, the inspiration for my friends to start their own collections. I also remembered a story when I took part of my collection to school and, in a blink of an eye my album disappeared and a couple days later a ‘coleague’ showed up with a stamps collection incredibly similar to the one I had recently lost.

The thing about this time travel was something very positive where I got in touch with something I was so intimate with and ‘connaisseur’ long ago and today, in cold blood, it´s nothing more than an old shoe box in the midst of many others, although of an invaluable sentimental attachment to this writer.

With this long forgotten theme I decided to go after how Philately is doing in our days, specially with the advent of the Internet. It was somewhat surprising: the ways the clubs, societies and here in Brazil, the Correios (Post Office) had profissionalized in this field. Everything became easier, more dynamic than it was in the underground world of Philately back in the 80´s. I leave here some links for further searches.