Gun to my head, if I were asked by a captor to claim expertise in one thing and one thing only, it would be living as an expat.
I’ve done it a lot, in a lot of places — like, more than, I would reckon, 99.9% of the global population.
And the worst part is…
Not the food — that’s great, for the most part (although Eastern European fare isn’t very spicy, literally or metaphorically).
It’s not the women — foreign women are delightful and not ruined by feminism, by and large.
Nor is it the language barrier; Google Translate works wonders.
The weather can be great, depending on the location.
No, the absolute dredges of living abroad — which no one warns you about ahead of time — is getting international mail delivered.
It´s totally, like, Kafkaesque.
Having recently been on a multi-hour quest to recover a package mailed to me that wasn’t ever delivered because Google Maps told me the wrong zip code and no one from the mail service bothered to call me even though I put my local phone number on the package and then having been informed the only remedy was to file an official complaint on a website that didn’t contain any English so that some unseen manager in “The Warehouse” — which I can’t be told the location of for some reason — can “decide what to do with it,” I was reminded of my many torturous misadventures undertaken in the name of international shipping.
When I was living in Vietnam, I ordered a book that I needed desperately for an online course I was taking — a totally banal academic text on international relations.
The Vietnamese “Department of Information and Communication” intercepted it and decided my book required a license to import in case, I guess, it contained some subversive material.
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So I got this message from UPS:
Dear customer
I am from UPS service. I send you arrival notice for your package. According Viet Nam law, Viet Nam customs re- quired you to do cultural license at Ha Noi Department of Information and Communication at 185 Giang Vo street, Ha Noi
You can do it by yourself or empower UPS do it
If you empower UPS to do license, firstly, please send me your photo of passport, I send you all docs to sign and send to UPS Office.
It takes 5 working day to do license in Viet Nam. Moreover, I need original passport or notarized copies in Viet Nam to do license
Please check and confirm by email
That ordeal ended up taking way, way longer than “5 working day” to sort out, and all of the money I spent on expedited shipping because I really needed that book ASAP was for naught.
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More recently, while in Peru, a package I had ordered from the U.S. containing generic supplements legal, as far as I know, everywhere in the world and available over the counter, was seized.
Instead of my package, I got an email informing me that the Peruvian customs office would need me to provide a doctor’s prescription for each of the non-controversial, non-pharmaceutical supplements I had ordered, which included things like vitamin D and zinc.
So — not one prescription for all of them, they clarified, but a separate prescription for each of the ten or so items, notarized by a doctor with an accompanying explanation for each one regarding why I needed them.
Needless to say, I declined to jump through the hoops.
What happened to that box of supplements is anyone’s guess.
