Sunday, 31 January 2010
Settling in
Well, I think we are now well and truly settled into our new home. All the mad dashing from China - all done at breakneck speed - behind us. You might ask, why all the rush after seven years of living there. here are some answers!
When we first went to China, we had been living in Holland and simply put all our things in storage, got on the plane with the cat, a story in itself, and headed for Peking (Beijing in politically correct talk, but Peking in English). After a few years of paying half our income on storage fees, we decided to ship our goodies to China. What would be a simple task anywhere else is a mammoth task in China. First of all we had to convince our employers to support us - this meant getting them to "allow" us to import our personal belongings. The we had to get them, the college where we worked, to complete all the documentation required to do this. This actually needed signatures from four senior managers including the President of the college Board of Directors, PLUS, a copy of the college's certificate on incorporation, to prove it was a genuine college - not enough that it had 10,000 paying students and over 500 teachers! This took over a month to accomplish as most of the managers were somewhere else when it was their turn to sign.
After all that, the documents had to be submitted to the Customs people for their approval, and only then could the shipment begin to actually move from Holland, by sea. This was no easy task as it required our container to be transshipped in Hong Kong harbour onto a small river ship that then trekked up the Pearl River to Canton (Guangzhou- as per Peking). Now it was in the hands of the Chinese Customs - HELP. They X-ray everything and then demand duty on such things as a twenty-year-old, old-fashioned, record player that Barbara had bought in a charity shop for ten pounds - she has a collection of old LPs and 45's, but no way to play them! We paid up about 200 pound in duty and "other" payments - never detailed, so you can imagine what they were for. Eventually our stuff arrived in our home in China.
Now comes the good bit. In order to export our things when we eventually leave China, we would have to go through the entire process in revers, only this time have to account for any items we had discarded, like anything which had broken and we had chucked out, and then pay excise duty on them - the authorities would think we had sold them on to some unwitting Chinese person. After all this we ended up asking our shippers if there was any possible way to get our stuff out of China without going through all this procedure. He scratched his head and came up with the fact that we could actually ship 10 cubic metres each out by truck, and only by truck, if we sent it by the equivalent of DHS, sort of mailing it! And it wouldn't even be X-rayed by customs. YES, we said, YES, YES!! China is full of idiosyncrasies, and this is only one of them. Now 10 cubic litres is a lot of space, approximately 350 cubic feet for my American friends. So we now had the possibility of shipping almost all our things with absolutely no hassle and even without informing the college and having to get their approval just to get the stuff out the front gate. We lived on campus and had at least two levels of security to get through before the open road! If this sounds a bit like escaping from a prison camp with all your worldly possessions, including a cat, it is exactly that.
We were now in the middle of the summer break and the campus was almost empty, apart from a few teachers who had nothing better to do and the eternal security guards. The shippers arrived and we bluffed the truck through the gates. We stayed on in our house as poor Puss had to still go through the remainder of her vaccinations. After another week, the cat exporter duly took us all to the train station where we boarded the train to Hong Kong in the company of a young man who would handle the cat customs at Hong Kong side!
That was it and now we're here.
When we first went to China, we had been living in Holland and simply put all our things in storage, got on the plane with the cat, a story in itself, and headed for Peking (Beijing in politically correct talk, but Peking in English). After a few years of paying half our income on storage fees, we decided to ship our goodies to China. What would be a simple task anywhere else is a mammoth task in China. First of all we had to convince our employers to support us - this meant getting them to "allow" us to import our personal belongings. The we had to get them, the college where we worked, to complete all the documentation required to do this. This actually needed signatures from four senior managers including the President of the college Board of Directors, PLUS, a copy of the college's certificate on incorporation, to prove it was a genuine college - not enough that it had 10,000 paying students and over 500 teachers! This took over a month to accomplish as most of the managers were somewhere else when it was their turn to sign.
After all that, the documents had to be submitted to the Customs people for their approval, and only then could the shipment begin to actually move from Holland, by sea. This was no easy task as it required our container to be transshipped in Hong Kong harbour onto a small river ship that then trekked up the Pearl River to Canton (Guangzhou- as per Peking). Now it was in the hands of the Chinese Customs - HELP. They X-ray everything and then demand duty on such things as a twenty-year-old, old-fashioned, record player that Barbara had bought in a charity shop for ten pounds - she has a collection of old LPs and 45's, but no way to play them! We paid up about 200 pound in duty and "other" payments - never detailed, so you can imagine what they were for. Eventually our stuff arrived in our home in China.
Now comes the good bit. In order to export our things when we eventually leave China, we would have to go through the entire process in revers, only this time have to account for any items we had discarded, like anything which had broken and we had chucked out, and then pay excise duty on them - the authorities would think we had sold them on to some unwitting Chinese person. After all this we ended up asking our shippers if there was any possible way to get our stuff out of China without going through all this procedure. He scratched his head and came up with the fact that we could actually ship 10 cubic metres each out by truck, and only by truck, if we sent it by the equivalent of DHS, sort of mailing it! And it wouldn't even be X-rayed by customs. YES, we said, YES, YES!! China is full of idiosyncrasies, and this is only one of them. Now 10 cubic litres is a lot of space, approximately 350 cubic feet for my American friends. So we now had the possibility of shipping almost all our things with absolutely no hassle and even without informing the college and having to get their approval just to get the stuff out the front gate. We lived on campus and had at least two levels of security to get through before the open road! If this sounds a bit like escaping from a prison camp with all your worldly possessions, including a cat, it is exactly that.
We were now in the middle of the summer break and the campus was almost empty, apart from a few teachers who had nothing better to do and the eternal security guards. The shippers arrived and we bluffed the truck through the gates. We stayed on in our house as poor Puss had to still go through the remainder of her vaccinations. After another week, the cat exporter duly took us all to the train station where we boarded the train to Hong Kong in the company of a young man who would handle the cat customs at Hong Kong side!
That was it and now we're here.
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