The Great Philosopher, Confusion.

Confucious says "Never impose on others what you would not choose for yourself"
His evil twin Confusion says "Never yourself choose, or impose, or impose upon others detest, things that you."   



Recently I purchased some musical equipment from my guy at www.sweetwater.com and had it shipped to me in China.  Turns out this was quite a hassle in itself... people cannot ship music gear out of the USA without the purchaser changing their address on their credit/bank account to be the destination of the shipment.  I know it does not make sense, but fraud departments now days are so worried about scams that a loyal American customer cannot even call to order gear while touring without having to jump through a million flaming hula hoops.  After convincing the Americans to ship the gear to us, (two weeks after we were charged and officially purchased the equipment) our gear is now in customs in Beijing.

I receive a call from FedEx.  A woman with very little English asked me for my e-mail address, since I am expecting a package from FedEx, I gave her my e-mail address.  Ten minutes later I receive an e-mail, it is copied and pasted below.

Dear

1 passport copy
2 please fill the accessory personal letter, another is your air way bill
3 do the personal entry need about 6-7 working days

Thanks

Weird, okay, great.  I already know where this is going.  I open the attachment to find the following letter.
Please examine closely.

My thoughts on this letter follow:

"Personal effects Explain Letter"

More than the bad choice of words, I was bothered that they did not capitalize the second word..

"Dear Capital Airport Customs:
My Parcel Tracking#______________ Parcels of items for personal use, without any commercial purpose."

What?  Am I writing a freaking love letter?  Dear Capital Airport Customs: I have missed you every day since we last parted, and you tried to screw me out of a million dollars... but it is okay because I am really a forgiving person...

The second part seems straight forward enough, so I fill in my tracking number.  Moving on,

"1.  Statement:"

What?  Am I supposed to write something here?  Or are you telling me 'The following are statements?'

"Package itself does not contain the relevant state regulations to limit or prohibit the import of products"

After living in Asia for an extended period of time, I can kind of make out the meaning of this.  What they meant to say was "Your package exceeds the state regulations on imported products".  That is a nice statement, they told me there were going to be statements coming up!

"Can provide proof of purchase invoice (if not available please state why):"

What?  Are they stating that I can provide proof of purchase?  Are they asking me to provide proof of purchase?  The second portion makes me feel that they need proof of purchase... but since this is under the 'statement' section I hope what they actually mean is "You are now able to purchase invoices provided in a can".

"2. Detail Information:"

Straight forward enough!

"3. Additional instruction:"

I guess I can provide additional instructions for the guys going through my box of very expensive musical gear.  I am sure to write "Break it and I will break you!" but I am also tempted to write "All fake, very cheap" except Sweetwater provided the receipts inside the box.  Damn.

"4.  I already know of Customs Announcement No. 43 of 2010 declared value on personal items can not be more than 1000 CNY limit, I guarantee to avoid similar incidents happen again."

No I did not already know, I do not know how I would know, and I am not sure that I even believe that right now.  1000 CNY is about $150USD, is that really the price limit on something you can have shipped to China? "I guarantee to avoid similar incidents happen again." What?  Are they apologizing for me?  If so, I am not sorry!  However, I definitely guarantee that I will never ever ship anything to China ever again.

"First, individuals mailed items, customs import duties imposed by law, but apply import duties at 50CNY below shall be exempted from"  

Uhhh...  I think what they are saying is anything that has been shipped that is under 50 CNY ($8) is exempt from duty..?  What do you think?

"Second, individuals sent from or sent to Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan regions, items, limit of 800 CNY: sent from or sent to other countries and regions, items, limit of 1,000 CNY."

Ok, so Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macao although 'part of' China get even more screwed.  That makes me feel better.

This is my favorite:

"Third, personal mail import and export goods beyond the prescribed limits, should be procedures for returned goods or the provisions of the customs formalities.  However, only one item within parcels and indivisible, although beyond the prescribed limit, the Customs examination indeed personal use, in accordance with the provisions of personal items for customs clearance."

WHAT


THE


FUCK.  

GOOD FREAKING LUCK DECIPHERING THAT BAD BOY.

"5.  Base on China Customs'No. 147 decree:  Because I will not be available at customs site during inspection, I appoint Fedex employee to assist customs officer with inspection process."

I definitely do not know China Customs'No. 147 decree, but hot dang!  They must have underlined that portion of the letter because somebody who speaks o.k. English proof read it!  It is good writing, real potential there, and they underlined it because they did not want anybody to accidentally miss the best part of the letter!

"6.  I am willing to bear the customs in accordance with the relevant provisions of the tax levy, about RMB____________.  (total amount of tax based on the final scene customs instructions.)"

This part scares me.  Do I fill out how much I am willing to pay?  Or do I leave that blank?  How do I know how much to pay?  Shouldn't the company have filled that portion in before sending this to me?  The rest of the letter is obvious, but if I sign this and do not fill in #6, somebody gets to fill it in for me and I have to pay however much they say!!  AAAGGGGGHHHH!   Feeling CRAZY!  They are holding $3000US of music gear ransom at the airport

FedEx is a global company, there should be no reason that any portion of their company has some sort of crazy letter such as this!  No instructions other than to fill out and return.  Wow, I am really disappointed.  When I think that I actually paid them several hundred dollars for this confusion it makes me want to jump off my sixth floor balcony!

Love,
Mack

A disturbing evening...

    I must apologize to my blog readers!  I have not been a consistent blogger.  Many amazing things have been happening to me, I have just not had the time to be in my room writing away on my  laptop.  I am going to try to be more consistent though, starting now.

   First thing I want to do is introduce everyone to one of my closest friends out here, Tim.
Tim has grown up in China, and he works at the club that I play at.  He has expressed a serious interest in learning English, and I have seen his dedication to study.  We have what is called a language exchange going on, where he helps me with Chinese, and I help him with English.  What this actually equates to is both of us wandering around Beijing together not understanding each other for hours on end.  He is a great guy and has helped me on many occasions.  He is totally funny, and we spend more time teaching each other things that are "impolite" than useful language lessons.

    For the first six weeks I was living in China, I would ask people if I can borrow a pen and they would give me the weirdest look before handing over the writing utensil.  Tim is the guy that told me that I was mispronouncing the word for 'Pen' and instead was saying a slang word for "Female Genitalia".  Whoops.  "Excuse me Miss, do you have a P*&&$?"  For this little bit of advice, I owe a life debt to Tim.  For it would not have been long until I received a serious ass whooping if I did not start pronouncing 'bi' with the down up tone instead of the straight and high tone.

   I shot this video of an interaction Tim and I  had so that you guys can all see what our friendship is like.  He claims to be so wise because he is from the same home town as Confucius.

    Then these are my two other friends, Katrina and Sven.  We hang out often here, wandering around the Hutongs or going out to eat or whatever.

Katrina on the Left, Sven on the Right.  There Chinese
names are difficult to pronounce.

    I was late to meet with them the other day so they took me for some local Beijinger snacks as my 'reward'.

    Traditional breakfast food, this was a meal of cow stomach, what seemed to be onion rings with out the onion, and the most foul tasting soup I have ever had in my life.  It is made with fermented tofu, so basically you take the stinky tofu and blend it into this paste.  But anyone who knows me knows that I am not one to back down on any food challenges...

   They thought that I couldn't do it but I drank the entire bowl of soup no problem.  (It was awful, reminded me of a high school locker room after weights class), ate the whole plate of cow stomach and actually enjoyed the onion-less onion rings.   And what do you know?  I grew three inches afterwards!  I am 6'6 now!

Traditional Beijing breakfast comes with a Coca-Cola.  For real.  Can you imagine that? 

Now I will write about last nights adventure.

Deybis, Katrina and I were walking in the snow to a place called the LAN club, where we were going to meet one of our mega fans Sladi, who works as a manager for BMW here.  She is returning to Germany so she was having a going away party and we were all going to watch the "Jackson Twins", two twin brothers we know that sing R&B and dance classic hits here in town and around the whole world.

We were about ten minutes into our walk when I spy this:

Oh my god.

So we go over to check this person out, and they are convulsing on the ground in the snow, and it looked like they had been there for a while.

Hello?  Ni hao?  Nothing.  As I got close I could see it was a man, and I was basically yelling at him two feet away and I was not getting any response.

Should I shake him?  Me and Deybis discussed, but who knows if he was hurt and shaking him would cause more of a problem, plus I am in China and outside of introducing myself, telling people I am American, asking where ________ is and ordering beer, I cannot talk to anyone.

What do we do?  We would not feel okay leaving this person here, they would probably die.  It was really really cold out.  We asked Katrina what your supposed to do in this type of situation.  In the US, no problem, you call the cops or the ambulance and people would come help.  We were on a pretty popular road though, and there are quite a few people wandering past but everyone just kind of looked the other way.  She never had called the Chinese police before, the number is 110.  We asked her if she would do it and at least tell them to come grab this person.  She called and talked to them for ten minutes and told them where we were.  They asked us to stay with the person but not to touch them and wait for the police.

One hour later after standing in the freezing snow a police car with its lights flashing slowly drove past.  I ran out to the road to wave them down and they just looked, waved back, and drove off down the block.
WHAT?! Is that the kind of emergency help you get here?  When you hail a cop car for help they just look at you and drive away?

Katrina ran down the street after the car, they turned right on the next block.  Turns out that the police station was within 200 m. of the exact spot we were standing!  She went to them and asked them to come help and they would  not, instead they gave her a phone number to call for assistance.  The unconscious person was still shaking and twitching on the ground.

Fuming, Katrina called the new phone number.  A taxi driver drove up to us and noticed our situation and let us sit in the cab as we waited some more.  Thirty minutes later two cops finally arrived.  "Whats the problem?"  they asked Katrina.  She explained the circumstance.  "It is -10 C snowing, and there is a guy who looks like he is dying over there in the snow".  They tried to wake him up but couldn't, then said to her "This is a normal thing, you do not have to call the police for this".  Insert shocked, awkward silence.  She explained to them that it is not normal for me as an American or for Deybis as a Columbian, and the police officer shook our hands and they hauled this person up and tossed him in the back of the car...  I hope that they did not toss him in a drunk tank and rough him up at all.

No matter what this persons circumstance was last night, I hope that today they are okay.  We have a great emergency system in the USA, and to anybody who is traveling abroad just remember to be really careful because not every place is operating on the same or even a remotely similar system.  All the fun, uniqueness of living here in China disappeared a little bit after that eye opening experience.