September 9th, 2004 | The lowdown by Bryan Fox

Mailing Stuff Home, or Giving a Gift to the Family of Don Correo?

The Spanish post office is a pack of thieves. There, I've said it. I lived there for about four years, working and studying, and anything of value which was sent from my family in the US to my address in Barcelona mysteriously 'lost its way' on the long trip over the Atlantic. We just took to registering everything of any importance, and the problem more or less went away, though at the price of paying more than double to post anything.

I have a Catalan friend who told me he worked in the 'Correos' for a time as a young man. "We would open the big packages and look for souvenirs," he told me once, with a shrug and a laugh.

The ineptitude is not just a symptom of deliveries from overseas. A Brazilian I know sent a small package from Barcelona to a friend in Madrid. TWO MONTHS later it returned to her address in Barcelona with the postage cancelled, as though she were the recipient!

After my time in Spain I had amassed a fair amount of things, mostly books and papers. Knowing I would be far over the weight limit on my flight, and knowing also that there was no rush to get my things back, I went to the Correos and sent myself about 10 boxes via sea mail a few days before I left. Six weeks later, I began to get boxes at my address in the US, but besides looking as though they had been passed through the contraption that they used to kill Arnold Schwartzenegger at the end of the first Terminator flick, they also seemed a bit lighter.

So I weighed them. They must forget to feed the packages on the boat, because nearly every one of them had lost 4-6 pounds on the journey. Though I had wrapped each box tightly and packed it tightly as well, there was no shortage of free space inside them when I cut them open.

The most laudable effort was one box that they claimed "had opened in transit". They had repacked a box of my books, given me roughly half of them, and then thrown in a few other English-language books for good measure, along with a sealed letter from someone in England to a soldier in Kazakhstan. As they say, you can't make this stuff up. I can see the young bucks on the loading docks smoking unfiltered Marlboros and laughing "un libro es un libro, tio, que mas da?" as if merely sending ANY books would be good enough to fulfill their end of the contractural deal. I was missing used CDs, books, and other things I really didn't even think were worth taking. Guess I was wrong.

SO, if you've got to send stuff home from Spain, think twice about what it is you're mailing and how much it means to you. At 5 euros a kilo via sea mail, it ain't cheap anyway, and you'd probably be better off just buying a duffel bag and paying the extra cost at the airport. Vale?