The problem with sending stuff from a Chinese post office is that you have to buy the box from them and then have your things hand searched before they are sent off. This means that anything you want to send has to be small enough to fit in the post office boxes, and you must be ready to unpack for the search.
There's a post office about a ten-minute walk from our house. As with everything in China, sending our stuff was bound to take several trips over several days' time. We finally found an afternoon when we were both free to make the hike and buy the boxes. When we got there, we asked for a couple of their largest boxes. When the woman brought them out, we realized they were not large enough to send the basket. We explained that we wanted to send the basket to America and asked what we should do. At first they just stared at us, finally after some negotiations they agreed to mail the basket so long as we found a larger box ourselves. Fine.
The next couple of days were spent searching for a large enough box to fit all of Sarah's stuff. I was successful in packing what I wanted to send home into my smaller box, but still had some left over for another trip later. Several days after acquiring the box, Sarah and I took off carrying our loads down to the gate of the apartment complex. The boxes were so heavy that by the time we got there, we were drenched with sweat. Fortunately the complex guard guys keep a shopping cart at the gate for just such an emergency.
We hauled our stuff down the road, the shopping cart squeaking and people staring the entire trip. We pulled up the post office a while later and shoved the cart up against the side of the building to keep it from rolling away. As soon as we walked in the front door, the same woman from our last visit announced to us that they did not ship internationally. What!?
This is such a good example of China. She could have told us the first time that they don't ship internationally when we were buying boxes and asking about shipping to America! But no, she waited until we followed what she told us to do, took an afternoon off and made the haul. No amount of complaining would do the trick; they we're under no circumstances going to send the boxes. Needless to say, I was not happy.
A couple of days later we brought our boxes down from the apartment (again!), found the shopping cart, received the warning from the guard guys about not loosing it and started walking in the other direction to another post office about a mile away. Again everyone was staring at us. People slowed their cars to gape out the window, and those in the bike lane were nearly the cause of several accidents themselves.
We made it to the post office in one piece. Most importantly though, no one was killed along the way.
Sarah's box is obviously not standard issue and the woman balked when we told her we wanted to send it. She was certain that it was against the rules and could not be done. Rather than take the complaining method to get what we wanted we went on the offensive. We began to argue that because the other post office directed us there, they had to send it for us. She countered that they didn't know what they were doing and were just trying to get rid of us.
"But we believed them!" Sarah countered. We were not going to leave until something got done. We argued in circles for several minutes, she telling us there was no way, and us asking what then we were supposed to do. After some time passed and we still hadn't left, she gave in and agreed to send the boxes for us.
If I went to a post office in the US and was told I couldn't mail a particular item, I would just accept it as law. In China, my feeling is there's an excess of rules and nobody knows them. They'll tell you something is against the rules, but the feeling is clear that they are just making it up or are acting on a vague notion of what the rules might say. What is this?
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