All I can say is great service and fast shipping. I ordered the tapes to the Geraldine Cotter Traditional Irish Tinwhistle book and they got here from Ireland in 4 business days. I ordered them last Thursday afternoon and they got here yesterday. That’s faster than I could get something via UPS ground from California. Makes me wonder about all the people saying it takes weeks to get stuff from overseas. Was I just lucky? Oh well, no hesitations in buying from them again though. Great prices too. Even if you don’t have the Geraldine Cotter book but just want to hear some tinwhistle tunes, pick up the tune tape that goes with her book. 100 tinwhistle songs. It’s really great and costs less than 5 euro. If you have the book, it has all the written music to all 100 songs so I’ve got songs to last me years! Great deal!
Just figured I’d let anyone know who was thinking about using them, go for it.
I sent my brother a postcard from the tiny, rundown and absolutely wonderful excuse for a postoffice on the remote Cape Clear Island in West Cork. Considering that the ferry only runs once a day, the letter was sent in the late afternoon, and Cape Clear was the most remote place I went in all of Ireland, I expected the letter to arrive a month later. It arrived in NH two days after I sent it! 
Chris
Jim and Chris, I suspect you both got lucky, although not miraculously so. Officially, ordinary air mail letters and parcels from Australia to the States take between 4-6 working days. Unofficially, be prepared to wait 10 days. I’ve known letters to arrive even quicker. Since they go air mail, most of the wait time is spent on the ground at each end. I rarely have to wait more than six days (working and non-working) for parcels from the States. I get the impression that internal mail in the States is slower but I think we only hear of the unlucky cases since the expectation is that this won’t happen.
Indeed. I had a girlfriend in Scotland for a number of years and letters almost always took exactly 6 days. I think that’s about standard from/to Ireland as well.
Chris
On 2002-12-12 09:27, Wombat wrote:
I get the impression that internal mail in the States is slower but I think we only hear of the unlucky cases since the expectation is that this won’t happen.
Exactly right, Wombat. Outside the big cities, especially, US Mail is badly and often unfairly maligned. Priority Mail is advertised to take 2-3 days; in my experience two is the norm. First class mail generally takes 1-2 days, depending mostly on distance.
What you hear about, though, are the letters that get lost or the postal carriers that goof up. It helps to remember that the US Postal Service can handle up to a BILLION pieces of mail a day. The overwhelming portion of it is handled well, but of course no reporter ever got press by talking about that part.
The US Mail is even less likely to be praised because not only does it work but it’s a PUBLIC service, Goddamit, and a FEDERAL one to boot, and that just gets up some people’s noses.
hey Rogele,
would you translate your signature for me?
“An Pluiméir Ceolmhar” → ??? Have read that so often now and have no clue what it means.
Salut, Clo-clo.
It means ‘the musical plumber’, and is a characteristically self-deprecatory reference to the fact that I play the (uilleann) pipes. It started as a jokey pen-name for a few articles which I wrote, and was inspired by pen names attributed to the Gaelic league scholars in a scene in Flann O’Brien’s satiric book ‘An Béal Bocht’ (the poor mouth).
I derive some additional pleasure from the fact that my pipes were made by Andreas Rogge in the appropriately-named town of Tübingen.
Roger you must fondly remember the discovery of a set of pipes made by the famous Willie McSink as described in an article in An Piobaire during the mid 80s.
The 80s were my latency period, Peter, when I never actually admitted to myself that I wasn’t playing, but just dropped out of contact with the music and the musicians for a while. A combination of work and children. Perversely, it was really the move to Brussels that got me going again.
Tell me more about the putative McSink, such as who wrote the article.
Just had another rather amazing confirmation of how well the Irish postal sytem works, a set of CD cover photographs posted at my local post office on friday morning was just confirmed by e-mail from the recipient as having arrived on the friday evening in Dungarvan, Co Waterford. Regular mail, try beat that, anywhere in the world.