My Porto Alegre Time:

Wednesday, February 13, 2008

The Post Office - Correios

At the post office door, you have to take out of your bag/pockets
all metal things and place them in the small window. Then you go in
a revolving door and take them from the other side. If you're "locked"
in the door, it means that you still have metals on. You have to go backwards and take them out too. Same happens when entering a bank.
My first visit to a post office was quite shocking since I didn't know all that(-:
Next step is to take a number at the numbers machine.

Here's a list to help you find the nearest post office to you.
The correios site is very useful if you read Portuguese.

You can purchase package boxes at the correios. They don't sell soft envelopes.
When sending packages overseas, there's a difference in price between documents, which include
papers and CD's and merchandise which includes everything else. It's cheaper to send
documents.
The fastest and most expensive way to send a package would be by "Sedex".
Other than that, there are 2 more options - PRIORITÁRIO and ECONÔMICO.
Prioritario would take 4-5 days to arrive to destination and Economico 2-3 weeks.
After sending you can trace the package through the site.

In the correios site you can check the prices for sending packages.
Generally, the price is the same for packages up to 500gr and then up to 1Kg and so on.
Payment in Cash or Santander Bank cheque only.

4 comments:

William Koplitz said...

Hi, and welcome home!
The sending I've found to be pretty straightfoward, and our post office is really helpful, once you've taken your cellphone, any change and yoiur keys out of your pocketes.
You know what I found shocking, I received a DHL package and had to pay 37 R$ for it. And what was in it? One computer disk!

Anonymous said...

Hi Dafi & Lagan,

Let me welcome you to Porto Alegre, and congratulate you on the great blog you have here!

Anyway, about the revolving doors: not all post offices have that, only those that also work as bank (Banco Postal) agencies.

So, if you don't see the Banco Postal logo on the front, you don't have to worry about taking out your phone, keys, dental implants, etc...

malolo said...

What types of banking services can you do at Banco Postal? Can you deposit checks? What happens if the check is not from Bradesco (who owns Banco Postal) but from Itau or other bank?

Dafi said...

Hi Malolo,
As fas as I understand, if you have a bank account at banco postal,you can deposit any kind of check, no matter from which bank.