Here's our email exchange from earlier today:
Miss B: Just a quick note to ask if you received your drawing, I sent it about ten days ago. I hope you like it if you did!As this was going on, I realized... shit, I'm responding in such a Bulgarian way to this. Don't you see it?! I panicked that the postal worker might have kept my package!!! When I shared my realization with Biliana, she said: I would panic the same way, this is why I am writing!
Petya: No! It's not here yet! How did you send it?! Shouldn't take that long...
Miss B: Hmmm, I sent it regular mail. It is not very big, I put it in a magazine. Let me know, the post office here said it should take about 5 to 8 (!) business days, so this sounds about right. Let me know, I wanted you to get it for Valentines Days since it is red....
You know you are Bulgarian when anticipating a friendly package in the mail makes you anxious.
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9 comments:
I know, I risked ruining the surprise by asking ahead, but it was making me anxious. Please let me know when you receive it.
PS Those are the qualities that make us charming.
I think you have a right to be anxious after dealing with the Bulgarian post, several times while I was in Bulgaria and my mom would send a package, I would receive it ripped open, broken, and sometimes with items missing!
it's a risky adventure dealing with the Bulgarian post... My mom sent me a package last year, it came back to her six (!!!) months later with the note from US custom that the custom form wasn't filled in correctly by the Bulgarian post.
The story doesn't end up here - the postal office gave my mom the package back explaining to her that something's not right inside. Guess what - nobody speaks English over there to understand the reason why it didn't ship :)
Back in Bulgaria I was laughing my ass off when I saw the note from the US Custom :)
PS. Everyone of us has stories like these and they tell allot about in what society we grew up and how hard it is to change it
I sent my grandmother in law a package.. cost 40$ to send it out! In addition, it was received at the central post office... she can't travel that far...we picked it up when we went to visit her... had to pay another 4$ to actually ge tthe package... how annoying!! The lesson is to sent lighter, smaller packages... that way they will be sent to her neighborhood post office where she can walk there to pick it up...
This is why I never send anything to Russia. And my friend is in Zambia, gave her address, and said, oh, you can write to me here. Forget it. Who knows who'll be reading my doodles? :)
Every single solitary time my family has sent my wife and I something for Christmas or Birthdays from the States it has arrived with pieces broken and/or missing.
Bulgarian post is NOTORIOUS for being absolute shit. It's even worse now with the new rule implemented on January 1st where anything ordered from outside of the European Union must be opened in front of a customs agent, and if anything inside isn't listed on the customs form it will be confiscated.
I'll have to have my wife link the website article regarding a horror story of dealing with the new Bulgarian postal service when it went into effect on Jan 1st. Poor guy spent 4 hours filling out forms, paying fees, running up and down stairs, and ended up paying almost as much in fees as he did for his package. My favorite, however, was the downstairs office giving him a floppy disk (no joke) and telling him to take it upstairs...only when he got to the upstairs office they don't have a floppy disk reader on their computer (seriously, who the frak uses floppy disks anymore!?!?). Or the part where he paid the bank fee at the bank, got his receipt, went back to pick up his package...and they told him that they couldn't release the package until they saw the bank transfer come through into their account, which could take up to 4 hours. In their words, his receipt from the bank wasn't proof enough. They had to see the actual transfer to believe it was real.
My family sent packages for Christmas, 2 weeks prior to Christmas. We did not receive them until the end of January. 6 weeks later. Meanwhile, I sent a contract off in hard-form about 6 weeks ago to one of the magazines I sold a piece to and she JUST got the contract today...and threw a fit about how long it took/how badly damaged the package was. I shrugged my shoulders and told her that's what you get for refusing to do things via email.
if there is one thing I cannot stand about Bulgaria (I love this country!) it's the frickin' postal service.
Oh yes, and our Christmas packages had been opened and gone through, then taped up again. My mother is notorious for packaging things extremely well, and when we got them not only had the boxes been ripped open, but the insides were completely strewn about, they had VERY sloppily re-taped things, and never even bothered to hide the fact they opened it and went through it.
I told my family to just stop sending us stuff because it's not worth it. Things always arrive broken, and quite frankly I refuse to go stand in line for 2-4 hours and PAY MONEY to pick up something that is MINE BY RIGHT.
Hate hate hate the BG postal service :)
For your reading pleasure....
http://www.dnevnik.bg/bulgaria/2010/01/06/838566_evala_be_mitnica/
I have had so many former Soviet-bloc postal misadventures, I totally understand!!
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