After asking advice from a few friends about the best carrier to send my ‘Art Gallery’, my collection of gifts, souvenirs and other memorabilia home by it seemed the German company DHL was in the lead. There were two problems. The first was that the impressive web site seemed designed to communicate its information to big companies who could afford to employ someone to attend seminars on ‘Understanding how to ship things through DHL’. As a mere expat teacher who just wanted to send some nice things home to help me remember my time in China I felt snubbed. My friends in the Hangda company said they would have a DHL rep come round to give a quote at a not too horrendous rate and I felt relieved. Then they said I should go to the website, download an invoice form, print it and fill it in ready for the rep’s visit, and I began to hear the word ‘impossible’ chanting in my brain like a work by Philip Glass. Luckily another friend asked if I had tried the Post Office.
That humble institution had been eliminated early in the search, for reasons such as, reputation for disappearance of items during transit, refusal to take DVDs, slow service, etc. BMW and I checked the website and found my things could be sent for less than half the cost of the German company. Though it was said that DVDs for private use could be delivered by DHL I had decided to leave my 283 disks behind, selling them to BMW who was happy to keep them. We had spent many happy hours watching them together. MONEY was also very important to me by now as I wondered how to re-establish my life again in the wonderful world of Oz where the yellow brick roads require cars that work without too much maintenance or too many repairs.
The Post office won the day after agonies of choices. We were helped by our friend the local shopkeeper to find a strong young woman with a handcart to help us and got boxes from the PO to pack things in. It was a last minute process and not all of my allocations of things to boxes were clever. On Tuesday morning BMW and I and the strong young woman went to the PO with four boxes and a bag of clothes to transfer to another box.
The first box was handed over for checking and when we answered ‘crockery’ to a question about one item the clerk told us it would be broken and tried to take it out. I laughed and told her to leave it in. it was unthinkable at that stage to consider changing anything to another box and giving it to DHL who guarantee there will be no breakages. I had such a struggle to organize things that far that I had no energy to rethink. The big snow in Wuhan was causing all sorts of difficulties including disrupting international postage services. Somehow international mail could not be sent if the PO was not online and the connection had failed every afternoon for a few days. This made me edgy when the box tying process took a very, very long time and other customers came thrusting their goods at the clerk, who would obligingly put our work aside and serve them. Then we were given forms in quintuplicate to fill out and we borrowed a pen and set to work. This branch was out of the largest box size and I thought I would need two, not one but the clerk and I pushed worthy of a wool presser and squeezed clothes and sleeping bag into one. We had to write the address for the sender in Chinese and the receiver in English in prescribed places on each box.
Then we paid a small fee to the box seller/packer/inspector and moved on to the counter marked ‘International’ where a leisurely young man did his job of checking that addresses were in the right place and accepting the boxes for transit to Australia. The clerk’s main job seemed to be to check the quintuplicate forms for legibility and they weren’t. BMW and I returned to the desk with the pens and stamps and glue and drew over the writing on almost every page of these poor quality duplicating sheets before they were finally accepted. Finally the insouciant young fellow finished weighing the boxes and sticking some of the duplicate forms on them and gave me the bill. I paid and we left. The payment was the only part of the process I was happy with as it really didn’t cost much at all. Much less than DHL. I was told the boxes would not arrive for three months and when I took that in I wished I had been more practical in my packing scheme and realized I would have to buy more undies when I got to Australia. Then I just turned and reeled off out of there into the -7 degree cold and went to the tea shop for a warm drink before going home to do the last of the organizing of my suitcases and carry on backpack.