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When we were moving from Cambridge to Istanbul, we decided to send our warm clothes, along with some books, by post. Since we did not need them right away, it would be more convenient and cheaper to not have to cart them halfway across the world. Or so we thought... It cost us about $120 to ship three medium sized boxes with USPS. They all went out from the post office in Harvard Square, on the same day. They had my name on them as the sender and were sent to my parents' address since we did not have our own address in Istanbul yet. Several months later, as we were settling in to our apartment in Cihangir, dad called to say that our packages had arrived. Or rather he had received an info slip about a package. However, when he took the slip to his local post office, he was told that he had to go to the package distribution center, which was somewhere in Güngören, a district in the middle of the urban sprawl that has long since run over the boundaries of old Istanbul. That meant that dad had to drive us there, and also meant that I had to take time off during working hours. The first time we made the trip (asking around for directions made it an hour long drive in the back streets of Güngören), I asked him if he had brought the info slip as we were walking inside. He told me that the local post office had taken it from him and told him that he would not need it since all the information is computerized these days. We walked into a warehouse with the trappings of a typical Turkish government building. Whitewash peeling off the walls, dirty floors, dim, white fluorescent lights and signs that nobody, including the workers, pays any attention to (for example "no smoking" or "take a number for service"). There were numbered windows cut into crude aluminum partitions which extended down the length of the warehouse. We walked up to the first window (labelled "1"), where we were told that we needed to get the paperwork for our package from window 2. At window 2, the first thing that the elderly looking woman with a Balkan accent asked us was "Do you have your information slip with you?". My dad told her that the local post office had taken it. Her face acquired the expression of a person on whose shoulders the entire weight of the world has just been dumped. She then tried to pull up the information by pecking at her keyboard one key at a time. After a quite a bit of unproductive tapping and several phone calls to various people about how to use her computer, "You'll have to ask upstairs for that info..." she said. When we started up the stairs, she called after us "...but you can not go upstairs, it's forbidden to customers!". Indeed, there was a sign which proclaimed "only official personnel allowed beyond this point" at the foot of the stairs. It took some time to convince the guard standing by the sign, but we finally did. Once we got to the second floor, we found a echoey, large room stuffed full of ancient line printers all chattering away furiously. The entire set-up was manned just by one young woman. She told us that the information was in the system but the paperwork had not yet been printed out. "We sometimes send out the information slip before the paperwork is ready" she said, almost shouting to make herself heard through the din. "If I were you, I would come back in a couple of days, that way you will make sure that your package's papers will be waiting for you". Two days later, the paperwork was ready at window 2. We then went to window 7 and gave them the paper work. We were told to wait and we would be called. After about half an hour, window 8 called us. The box was to be opened and inspected in our presence. While this was going on, the woman in charge of window 8 informed me that there was a charge of 25 YTL (Yeni Türk Lirası, equivalent to about 67 cents to the lira) per box, just for the privilege of being able to pick up our packages. "Oh, and I see that they are addressed to someone other than yourself, so we will have to levy a one-time tax of 20% the declared value of your package in euros as well, unless of course you can prove that they are your own belongings." she added. Of course, we had put down a value of $200 per box while shipping them, which meant that another $40 per box needed to be laid down at the foot of the Turkish Post altar. I seriously thought about leaving the boxes there and just sucking up and suffering the winter cold. "But they are my own belongings, even though I addressed them to my father!" I objected. "I'm his father." my father said, throwing his solid support behind my tax evasion attempt. Meanwhile, behind her desk, her co-workers had sliced open our box, spilling several heavy coats and a couple of books on the table. "In that case, in order for us to rescind the tax, you'll have to bring your kimlik (Turkish national ID card which every Turkish person has to carry), and your passport showing that you entered the country legally within the last two months," was the final verdict. They stuffed our things back into the now shredded box and tried to patch it with some scoth tape. Since there was still no word on our other two boxes anyway, we decided to come back again, this time with the documents that they required. When we came back later in the week, the window 8 woman told us that we would need three photocopies of the relevant pages of my passport. Of course, there were no copiers that we could use on the premises. Also, since it was close to lunch hour (all official business stops for the sacred lunch hour in Turkey), we would do well to go outside and find a place which had a paid copying service and have some lunch ourselves. Meanwhile window 2 told us that our other two boxes were in the system, but the paperwork (oh surprise of surprises!) was not ready. We were told that they may be done after lunch sometime. We ended up spending the entire afternoon at that dismal place. I saw a middle-aged woman start crying in front of window 7, sometime between lunch hour and tea time. My father had a huge row with the woman behind window 8. Need I add that when I went to pay my 25 YTL per box fee to window 6, the person there told me that three copies of my kimlik were additionally required, or that though we had all the paperwork, one of our boxes could still not be found in the warehouse (it turned up after a two-hour wait, the clerk telling me sheepishly that it had been mislabelled). I told the window 6 clerk I had not been informed that I had needed additional photocopies and that I had just gone out for a photocopy run before lunch. "Nobody other than me knows that you need those extra copies!" he said triumphantly. At the end of the day, after three trips and about 6 hours in the Güngören PTT package distribution center, we finally had our boxes. We would not freeze in the winter. The irony is that we could have brought the whole lot by putting them in an extra suitcase and paying British Airways an extra $100 to have with us on the plane over here. And this, my dear friends, is why you should never, ever, under no circumstance ship anything in a package to Turkey by post! Cihangir, 15 January 2006.
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Copyleft notice: Copyright (C) 1999-2005 Mustafa Ünlü. This information is free; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version. |