Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam: Saigon post office delivers on style

In this era of Instragrams and emails, sending postcards is a thing of the past. When I was young, I stamp-licked in colonial-era post offices across Asia, and picked up my poste restante at Singapore's GPO. It's years since I was in an overseas post office but, luckily, Ho Chi Minh City's is hard to miss.

It looks like a petite palace on the outside, all apricot paintwork and neoclassical moulding. Green shutters are folded back like butterfly wings. Couples borrow its romantic, Paris-style backdrop for wedding photos. Inside, though, vaulted steel arches are reminiscent of a Victorian-era railway station: no surprise when you learn the building was designed by Gustave Eiffel, who had already made his name designing bridges for French and Vietnamese railways.

Completed in 1891, Saigon post office has the optimistic architecture of a time when rail travel and telegraphy were rapidly expanding. Step inside and you'll see a frescoed wall to your left that vaunts the telegraph lines snaking over 1930s Indochina. On the opposite wall, a map shows Saigon's then rapidly expanding suburbs.

The post office was completed in 1891. It's a clever design, light yet airy. Green-painted ironwork clashes with salmon walls and the bright yellow uniforms of post-office staff. The floor is a glory of patterned tiles. But all eyes are drawn down the main hall to a huge portrait of Ho Chi Minh with a Mona Lisa smile. His moustache is impressive, his beard a wispy tangle.

Travellers of a certain age might feel sentimental. There are rows of still-working phone booths of the sort I used in my youth to call home, after considerable discussion with operators and much clicking on the lines. Young Korean tourists find them curious, and pose for photos with the old-fashioned earpieces to their heads. It tells you something about changed times, and the relentless, exhausting speed of our modern communications.

Slow down, look around. Peer through doors and spot workers at desks teetering with documents. Listen to clanking wind chimes from the souvenir shops that have taken over the entrance arcades. At the "parcels and items for packing" counter under the Uncle Ho portrait, watch parcels being wrapped. Elsewhere, locals send flowers and buy tickets for water-puppet shows.

A public writer sits by a wooden desk awaiting customers. Duong Van Ngo is in his 80s and has worked for 60 years in this post office. He has wrist bones brittle as a bird's wings, a full head of grey hair neatly combed. His face is a wrinkled map of history. He must remember the Americans and even the French, and what stories he could write down if he wasn't scribbling for other people.