Italian Postal Service, Part 2

As our Christmas mail has been trickling in this past week we came across a couple more little surprises with the Italian postal service. The first involves Mark and Gina, who amazingly still mailed us their annual Christmas bread (Stollen). Gina, the master of productivity, bakes a couple dozen loaves and mails them to friends and family every year. They paid around $20 on shipping, and yet the mail service managed to take nearly 6 weeks for delivery! That is almost how long it took to ship two large boxes by sea from Australia to Raleigh when we moved from Canberra. Unbelievable.

Gina's Stollen aged for 6 weeks actually tastes really good still (though a little microwaving doesn't hurt). This is a testament to her baking skills!

The next package was from my parents. We actually just got a little card in the mail saying it had to be picked up at the post office across town. In order to retrieve it we had to pay 10.56 euros (around $14), even though Mom paid $14 for the shipping. Why the fee? About 2.50 euros for customs, 5 for taxes, and 3 went to the post office (maybe they charged the little package rent?). I think they held the parcel and charged us because when Mom mailed it she wrote in an estimated value. The pick-up fee ended up being nearly 50% of the declared value of the contents! Note to anyone unfortunate enough to mail anything to Italy--DO NOT write in any value on the shipping slip if you hope to avoid these fees.

Finally, there was the box from Seth's folks. It was the first parcel to arrive, "only" taking about 4 weeks for delivery. Everything was fine, except the box was full of gritty dirt, almost like cat litter and sand. Don't know where that box had been, but at least the contents were untainted, which included a really cool gingerbread house kit and some hot wheels for Lorenzo :o) Working on the gingerbread house right now (waiting for the icing to dry...).