Year of the Ram is Coming

My first the Year of the Ram postcard arrived from Taiwan today. It's a maxi card featuring a colorful sheep in paper cut art.  The NT$3.5 stamp, with the image of a sheep stepping gentle pace over plum blossoms against a pink background, is part of a two-stamp set issued by Chunghwa Post in Taiwan on December 1, 2014 to welcome the spring and bring good fortune. The Year of the Ram begins on February 19, 2015, and ends on February 7, 2016. USPS will also issue the Year of the Ram stamp as a Forever stamp in self-adhesive souvenir sheets of 12 in San Francisco, CA on February 7, 2015.

Orchid Island Scenery of Taiwan

Postcard TW-1105414 from Taiwan shows a beautiful sunset view of Orchid Island (蘭嶼), a volcanic island in Taitung County off the southeastern coast of Taiwan. The island is home to the aboriginal Tao (達悟族), an ethnic minority group who migrated to the island from the Batan Archipelago 800 years ago. Out of a total current population of 4,000, approximately 2,400 belong to the aboriginal Tao, who are Austronesian people linguistically and culturally closer to the Ivatan people of the Batanes islands in the Philippines. The rest 1,600 are Han Chinese.

The island has been a nuclear waste storage site at its southern tip since 1982, with 100,000 barrels of nuclear waste from Taiwan's three nuclear power plants. Following years of protests by local residents since 2002, demands to remove the nuclear waste have intensified after the Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan in 2011.

The card came with a newly issued the Year of the Horse stamp by the Chunghwa POST.