moving into calle 56 october-november 2006

OCTOBER 20, 2006

Since many of you suffered along with us as we got organized to load the container and have it shipped down here (and the rest of you kept up our spirits with food, drink, and good company), we wanted to tell you the end of the story.
We worked so hard and were hyper-organized for this move. We'd reviewed all the boxes, thrown out contraband like cosmetics, toiletries, and those extra bottles of shampoo we'd planned to smuggle down here. We finessed a last-minute snafu when our movers were not available on the same day as the truck would deliver the container to our storage locker in Glenview and found substitute movers who were wonderful. Container headed off and got to Florida lickety split. Then we got a call from the shipping line wondering about our paperwork. Paperwork?? What paperwork??? We'd provided a professional Word packing list, numbered all our boxes accordingly, and what else did they want??? They wanted the list to include value of goods included and weight for EACH of our 400+ boxes and various pieces of furniture and art. Hmmm. Well on what should be base this "value" -- insurance replacement costs, original purchase price, sentimental value, fucking nothing I asked ever so sweetly. Whatever we wanted to use, they said, however, we should be aware that customs would be alerted if any grouping of items had a value of over $2500. And you can imagine that groupings of things like electrical appliances (I mean you saw our giant HDTV!!), books (oh just shoot me now), and art (yeah, right) would trigger an audit by US customs, unloading of the entire carefully packed container and delay.
Somehow, we skated past this having typed madly into the night, making up values and weights without lying too much, and the container left only a day late. It arrived in Progreso beating us by 24 hours.
Monday we headed out to the customs broker here in Merida, whom we'd hired months before and consulted with every step of the way. He took us out to our container baking on the dock and opened the new lock (since customs had in fact opened the container in Florida and broken our expensive combination lock) and showed us the container had made it with our stuff in it. Since by this point, it was mid-morning, it was too late to start the process, so we agreed to come back the next morning early (8:30am), don the hard hats, and watch every thing be unloaded, every item be opened by our broker, every single thing be written down on a new list in Spanish, and then repacked into the container. We stood in the hot hot sun and baked all day (or huddled in the container where it is not an exaggeration to think we could have cooked an entire meal or steamed some rice with the sweat off our bodies) while this was done. We actually put up our outdoor umbrella to have some shade out on the dock and watched these idiots, whose job it is, repack our container. We were very helpful using our typed packing list as a guide.
Then we waited for their call telling us the container had cleared customs and was on its way to us. They'd said Monday or Tuesday. No word on Tuesday so we called our broker who said oh didn't we tell you that you have to pay us before we put the container on the customs list. NO, but how much do we owe you, Eva said beginning to simmer. Well, we don't know because the only person who quotes prices had a death in his family and is a little behind with his paperwork, they purred in Spanish to Eva and at this point smoke started to come out of her ears. Long story short, we paid them, the stuff cleared customs (where it was opened again, but only partially and we had no problems), and was set to be delivered here yesterday sometime between 5pm and midnight.
We had asked the trucking company which brought the container in to provide 6 burly (or as burly as a Mexican can be) men to unload and a ramp since the container sits up about 5 feet off the ground on the truck and we had some unwieldy stuff like an elliptical machine and big-ass TV and limitless boxes of books. Oh yes, and to call us when they were about to arrive. (This is always a joke here, we ask whomever it is who is doing some service for us to call us and tell us when they are coming, so we can be home, and they say OK, and then they absolutely NEVER call ahead.)
Through some emails, we did learn that the truck would not come before 11pm since the police do not allow deliveries in a truck that size in the centro except from 11pm and 4am. We prayed hard and low and behold, the truck showed up at 11:01pm. The men were nowhere to be seen. The driver of the container truck knew nothing about any men. A drunk walking down the street offered his assistance and did help us with bolt cutters to open the latest new lock, but we demurred further assistance from this guy.
Finally, around midnight, 5 tired men who'd already worked a full day showed up and began to unload. They hustled and were even nice enough to haul our teak table and chairs up to the outdoor upper terrace which entailed carrying a large, heavy, unwieldy piece of furniture up a wrought iron staircase. About a quarter of the way to unloading all this stuff, the lights went out. Literally. No electricity on the block at all. This made unloading from a large, hot, dark container even tougher and telling them where to put what (what is that??) difficult as well!! Fortunately, we had candles. We put candles in some shot glasses (since we had no idea where candle holders might be) and these good sports continued to unload by candlelight!! By 3:15, they were done, and boy oh boy, so were we!!!
Now starts the fun of unloading. And actually, it has been fun so far because this stuff has been packed up for over 18 months, so we'd kinda forgotten what was here. I have just unwrapped and put away our Waterford crystal, for example, which we thought we'd left in our one remaining locker in Glenview, so this process may really be full of surprises!! We have found almost no breakage so far, too, which amazes us after all that packing and unpacking.
Oh and the silver lining, charges for each man who worked unloading, schlepping, carting, and straining in the middle of the night in the dark ..... 250 pesos or under $25 US for 3 hours of work. Great to be back home!! Now we'll be settled and really look forward to some company as it cools off.


NOVEMBER 2006

Well, obviously Thanksgiving is not a holiday here, however, today Monday is -- it's the day of the revolution and there've been loud parades with marching bands for the last hour and will be fireworks tonight, so it's my kind of holiday! We will be celebrating the turkey holiday with friends and a turkey from Costco later this week.
Just had our first guests staying in our home-- they came all the way from Alaska and were wonderful . We had a great time touring and hanging out and just chatting AND the men insisted that they needed something to do, so they hung all the pictures -- no small task!! This occurred while the two women made us delicious spread using their hand-caught, specially-canned, private label salmon. We have two more friends from up north coming for the long weekend ahead so cannot wait to see them outdo these folks.