Post Office Adventures

For the past few weeks Laura and I have been working on sending boxes home with winter clothes and some other things so we don't have so much to take back home on the plane. As most tasks in China are, this has proved to be much more difficult than we originally thought. First we went to the post office by our house and bought big boxes. However, the biggest boxes they have are only about 14" x 8" x 20" and I have a big bamboo basket that I wanted to send home that would not fit. I told them that I wanted to send the basket back to the US and it would not fit in any of their boxes and asked them what I should do. They said that if I found a box big enough I could just pack it in that and it would be fine. Satisfied, we took our boxes home. After searching for a big enough box for several days I finally got one from Deborah that her washing machine had come in. So we packed our boxes up and Saturday morning set out to the post office to mail it home. I was a little worried about how much mine would cost because my box was pretty big, about a 2' cube, and kind of heavy. We carried our boxes all the way to the front gate of our living area and got asked by two people if we were moving. We said no, we were just sending things home.
At the front gate we asked the guards to let us borrow the rusty shopping cart that they have for people to use to cart things from the gate to their houses. When we told them we wanted to bring it outside and we would bring it right back they looked utterly confused, but said OK and we walked quickly away before they could change their minds. So here we are, two waiguoren (foreigners) with a rusty shopping cart full of two giant boxes rolling down the bike lane. Everybody was starring, i am surprised we didn't cause an accident. They all thought we were nuts, even more than usual. We finally make it the 1/2 a mile or so to the post office and carry our boxes in just to be starred at in disbelief and then told that we couldn't send our boxes at this post office because it was only a domestic post office. I couldn't believe it. I think they just told us that because they didn't want to have to deal with us. But even if it was true, why didn't they tell us when we came in to by the boxes? I guess in China you have to ask the right questions, people never offer helpful information of their own accord. They were probably just trying to mess with us and had a good laugh about it after we left. It's just one of those things that is so absurd you can't get upset about it, you just have to laugh about how ridiculous it is. We asked them where we could go to send our boxes and they did manage to tell us that the Jiuyan Bridge Post Office could send international packages, so Monday afternoon we continued our quest. We again carried our boxes down the stairs, past all our confused neighbors, to the gate where we again borrowed the cart. This time the guards were a little more hesitant to let us borrow it and reminded us many times that we had to bring it back. So then we rolled our packages the mile or so down to the bridge post office. This time we almost did cause an accident because people kept slowing down to stare at us. I kept getting this passive aggressive urge to ram the cart into their cars, but I was able to control myself. We finally made it to the post office and carried our boxes in. The post office workers, at first, didn't know what to make of us. They told me that my box was too big and there was no way to send it. I explained that I had a big basket inside that didn't fit in their boxes and another post office told me if I found a big box that would fit it that would be OK. They told me that the other post office didn't know what they were talking about and there was "mei you ban fa" (no way). I kept arguing that I had to send all the things home because I couldn't take it all back on the plane and they asked me if I really wanted the basket and I said of course otherwise why would I be going through all this trouble to send it and finally they decided that they would have to turn my box inside out since there was writing on the outside, but then it would be OK. So I unpacked my box in the middle of the post office and they took the box apart and rebuilt it inside out. Then I repacked it and we sealed it up. So I ended up being able to send it and it was alot cheaper than I would have thought, only 531 kuai for a HUGE 22 kg box. I just hope it makes it. Laura and I left feeling very proud of ourselves that we finally accomplished this surprisingly daunting task and argued our way to get exactly what we wanted. It just goes to show that the rules in China are flexible. "Mei you ban fa" really means "I don't really want to" and if you argue long enough they probably are able to find a way. Now Laura and I want to go back and argue with the people at the post office by our house to see if they really can send internationally and were just messing with us. I hope this argumentativeness doesn't come back with me to the States though, because I don't think it would go over very well in our culture. So, after alot of mafan (trouble) we finally achieved success, which is the way it usually goes in China. Things may be 8 times more complicated and confusing, but in the end you will find a way to get it done.