Thanks to Mari Lippig for this interesting but annoying story.
A small post-office mystery with a surprisingly global explanation.
I went to one of the larger CTT post offices on Madeira with a very simple mission: mail a birthday card to California.
Nothing complicated.
Just a cheerful card in a perfectly ordinary envelope.
When I took my ticket, the number was 283. The counter was serving 198. Anyone who has visited a busy Portuguese post office will recognize that moment when you settle into a chair and begin a quiet meditation on patience, bureaucracy, and perhaps the meaning of life.
Eventually my number was called.
I stepped up to the counter, placed my envelope down, and asked for a stamp.
The clerk looked at the address.
“Estados Unidos,” she said.
Then she paused and told me something surprising.
“Não podemos enviar nada para os Estados Unidos.”
(We cannot send anything to the United States.)
Now the conversation was happening in Portuguese — and since Portuguese is not my first language, my immediate assumption was that I had misunderstood something.
Perhaps she had said we cannot send packages.
Perhaps she had said today we cannot send anything.
Perhaps she had said the computer system is broken.
So I tried again.
“It’s just a birthday card,” I explained in my best Portuguese.
She shook her head and checked with a colleague.
The answer came back the same.
“Fechado.” — Closed.
At this point I wondered if I had accidentally misunderstood the entire Portuguese language.
When I asked why, she gave a one-word explanation:
“Trump.”
At that point I left the post office with my birthday card still in my hand and the slightly surreal feeling that international politics had somehow managed to interfere with someone’s birthday.
Naturally I went home and did what many curious people do these days when something puzzling happens.
I looked it up.
It turns out there is a real explanation behind the confusion, and it shows how global policy can create small local misunderstandings.
Recently the United States changed certain customs rules for imported goods, particularly the long-standing system that allowed small packages to enter the country with minimal customs procedures. For years many low-value parcels moved through postal systems fairly easily.
The new rules require more detailed customs processing for packages containing merchandise.
When this change took effect, postal services around the world — including Portugal’s CTT — had to adjust how shipments to the United States are handled. In the short term, this created restrictions or delays for packages containing goods while systems and procedures were updated.
But here’s the important detail:
Letters and documents were never part of that restriction.
A greeting card inside an envelope is considered correspondence, not merchandise.
So while a parcel full of online shopping might run into new customs requirements, a simple birthday card should still be perfectly fine to send across the Atlantic.
Somewhere between international policy changes and a busy Madeira post office counter, the rule seems to have been simplified to something like:
“Nothing to the USA.”
Which, as my birthday card discovered, is not quite correct.
For anyone sending letters to the United States from Madeira, it may help to use the right wording at the counter:
“Carta internacional – documentos.”
This tells the postal system that the envelope contains only correspondence.
In the end, this little episode was probably just a misunderstanding — the kind that happens whenever rules change and information takes a while to filter through a large organization.
But it also reminded me of something simple.
On an island like Madeira, many of us have family scattered around the world. A small envelope with a handwritten card can travel thousands of miles and still carry a little piece of home with it.
And hopefully, next time I stand at that counter with my birthday card, my Portuguese will be good enough — and the rules clear enough — that the conversation ends the way it should:
“Claro… só precisa de um selo.”
(Of course… you just need a stamp.)