On the eve of Mother’s Day here in the US, I find it only fitting to share these postcards my mom recently sent to my kids from the ‘Stans. My mom has been home for less than two weeks, but her return preceded all the postcards but one. We received this one from Almaty, Kazakhstan while my mom was still on her trip.

And here’s the funky stamp. It’s so Soviet space wars!

Next we received this postcard from Kyrgyzstan. She visited both Bishkek and Issyk-kul.

Sadly, the postcard from Kyrgyzstan arrived stampless. My brother probably has quite a few (he was married to a Kyrgyz woman). Today we received postcards for each child from Samarkand, Uzbekistan.

Interestingly, as the stamp shows, Uzbekistan uses roman letters, not the cyrillic from their former Soviet incarnation (although if I’m correct, the word Pochta on the bottom of the stamp is the pronunciation of the Russian for post or mail) .

My mom also traveled to Tajikistan and Turkmenistan, but didn’t send postcards from these countries. (The kids got some cool wall hangings from Turkmenistan, though.)

Happy Mother’s Day, Mom!