China Post

Since Vienna is my last term of the program (and because I bought so much stuff at the Silk Market in Beijing!) I decided to ship about a suitcase worth of stuff back to the US. A group of about six of us went down to the post office with our Webster coordinator one afternoon during our last week in Chengdu. I had opted not to previously go to the post office and get a box, and instead just rolled everything down in my suitcase and planned to pack the box up there. This turned out to be a good choice because the regulations of the Chinese post are quite different from anywhere else I’ve been. First of all, they have to inspect (item by item) everything you are going to ship, so they pretty much have to pack your box for you. If anything is wrapped up in tissue paper or bubble wrap or what not, they will unwrap it and inspect it before re-wrapping it. You’re not allowed to have anything wrapped in newspaper because they don’t want Chinese newspapers taken out of the country (the press is still controlled by the Chinese government). I had something that I bought from Thailand wrapped in Thai newspaper and the postal workers would even let that paper go out! They wouldn’t let us ship anything falling under the electronics category, so I am now still carrying around SIM cards from four countries and various internet cords (and they wouldn’t even let me ship home my electronic Catch Phrase game). It took the lady about an hour to go through everything I wanted to ship home.

Once everything was packed, we had to fill out all the paperwork, which took about another half hour. There were more customs forms/decelerations to fill out than I have ever seen, and many of them were various copies of the same form for different people. I was scared to find out how much my package would cost (it was BIG!) because shipping from Leiden had been pretty expensive. Come to find out, to ship a 18kg box to the States only cost me about $50 USD! It won’t get there for two months, but I won’t be there for three so it was perfect. It was funny because my friend Megan wanted to send a card to the States, and for it to arrive in 10 days would have been something like $25 USD. Time is literally money in this case.