Picking up Parcels at Airports

 

Some random pictures I took on a walk up 6th Avenue to the MoMA

 

The same old story

Everyone who ever had to move from one country to another for a longer period of time knows that the puny 20-23kg luggage limit offered by most airlines is simply not enough. He or she also knows that sending your stuff instead of taking it with you is costly and not always easy. Let’s just say you might have good reasons not to let the Kyrgyz postal system get its hands on any parcel that contains valuables, and not just because it will take several months to actually get delivered to a randomly chosen post office within a 50km radius of the address indicated.

So one alternative option is using the cargo department of airlines. Unfortunately, this is tedious as well, as you have to do the paperwork for the customs on your own. I fondly remember writing a letter in Russian to the head of the customs at Bishkek’s Manas Airport a couple of years ago,  asking him for permission to send my parcel. By hand. Nobody had apparently found it necessary to develop a form for such occasions.

 

The ubiquitous flag

 

Instead of sending my stuff from Kyrgyzstan to Switzerland and then to the US, I asked Ala to store it and send it directly to the US once I had a permanent address there. I didn’t want to put her through the hassle with the customs, so I decided to ask a specialized company (AriCargo) to take care of that part. Of course if you hire and pay for such a company, you assume that they will take care of all the bureaucracy. And, unsurprisingly, you would be wrong.

So one nice morning, I received a call from  Turkish Cargo, threatening to charge me a storage fee if I didn’t pick up the parcel within the next two days. Also, they mentioned something about customs procedures not being finalized. And so it turned out that sending a parcel via cargo in the US is not that dissimilar to the same experience in Dubai or Kyrgyzstan.

 

Shortly before Central Park

 

You head out to the airport to discover that it is even more sprawling than you would imagine when you trundle through as a tourist. You also discover that anything outside the arrival hall is designed based on the assumption that you have a set of wheels. I felt a bit lost at times dragging my suitcase (emptied to be filled with the parcel) across endless parking lots, or maneuvering across giant storage halls with futuristic fork lift trucks. A car would’ve been handy indeed, but so I drove out to the end of the subway, took the airport train to Federal Circle and hopped onto a shuttle bus that brought me to the Turkish Cargo’s office. There I was handed a form that I had to deliver to the US customs. So I drove back to Federal Circle and took another shuttle to the US Customs and Border Protection.

Now, the guys from the CBP are the ones you always fear might find something wrong with your documents when you enter the US, so it was somehow comforting seeing a couple of elderly chaps sitting there (admittedly in uniform and full gear), chatting about baseball results. And of course they hand you a highly confusing form to fill out. So far it could have been anywhere in the world – but then the customs officer patiently helped me fill out the form, even thought it was already past the shift change at 5pm. Also, he didn’t put any stamp on the form I had brought from Turkish Cargo. “It’s all in the computer,” he explained (and he was correct).

While waiting for the shuttle that would drive me back to Federal Circle, I counted the incoming planes (about one every minute) and hummed that famous tune from one of the few Swiss music bands worth listening to:

And back to Federal Circle, to take the next shuttle to the Turkish Cargo office. It is also seems to be universal rule of cargo bureaucracy somewhere down the line, an unexpected and unexplained fee is being charged. This time it was a 50 USD ” import service charge” AriCargo had never mentioned. But as the other side was holding my parcel hostage, what could I do? Of course someone had also opened the package and made sure that all the items I had carefully arranged so that they would not move around during transport would lie around loosely instead. I was past caring at that point. After five hours of shuttling back and forth, I was just happy to haul my stuff back to my apartment.

Forward to the Past – on the Panorama Hike in the Wild and Beautiful Val Bregaglia

Childhood memories

When I was still a toddler, my parents spent their holidays in one of the southern, Italian-speaking valleys of the canton Graubünden – the Bergell or Val Bregaglia. So during at least three summer weeks, I (and later also my brother) were carried through the mountains. A couple of photos is all that remains as proof, but I was curious if hiking there would uncover memories buried in a lost corner of my mind.

We took the train on the glacier express route through some remote valleys connecting Chur with St. Moritz and then traveled onwards with the bus, past the string of lakes on the plateau of St. Moritz and Silvaplana up to the Maloja pass road. Which – mental note to myself – would be nice thing to do also by bike or even canoe. And then maybe learn kite-surfing on the lake of Silvaplana.

The cheaper alternative

But I am digressing into the future (hopefully). For now, I found the small, family run hotel “La Stampa” in Casaccia, just below the Maloja Pass, where some amazing pictures by the Swiss painter Lukas R. Vogel were on display (and I was almost tempted to buy one that would have set me back 1500 USD – one of those where the mountain is visible only as a collection of snow fields in the light, with a black bench in the foreground).

We decided to sleep in the common room/dormitory for 35 USD per person and discovered that the common room can easily become a double room – it seems as if not too many people stay in the common rooms of Swiss hotels that are not Youth hostels. Good for us.

Annoying bug(ger)s

We left our main luggage in the locker and headed down the valley. The Maloja Pass is a favourite among motorcyclists, because of the beautiful landscape and the winding pass road. Luckily, after an hour of walking their waspish buzz was drowned out by the sound of the river in the valley.

Local food

As it was Sunday, and Switzerland (or at least its more mountainous regions) is one of the few areas where shops actually close over the weekend, we were happy to find a seat in a small Kiosk in Durbegia around lunchtime. They served most excellent sweet chestnut pie and home-made Salami.

That familiar feeling…

So far, I hadn’t felt any familiar tingling looking at the glaciers peaking across the dark rock walls of the mountain range on the other side of the valley. But later on, when we arrived in Soglio and descended further to Castasegna at the Italian border in the shade of chestnut trees, I guessed the origin of my fondness for Doro and the upper Ticino. The same white houses with stone roofs, closing in on the narrow, crooked alleys between them. They cling to the rocky walls like oisters, and most of the year, they are just as silent. The quiet, closed shutters of the houses testify to how many of the young people have left in pursuit of happiness to the cities or abroad.

Those who remain are their parents and grandparents, who themselves had earlier on made their living far away from where they have returned to now. They live in villages without sunrays in Winter, and do not move to the sunny and dry pastures hundreds of meters above them in Summer anymore. And so, within just two generations, the forest has reclaimed most of the steeper pastures, and the valleys look again wild and pristine – although they are bereft of a variety of fauna and flora that thrived on alpine pastures.

Swiss National Day Celebrations in Casaccia

The change became even more evident in the evening in Casaccia. As it was the first of August, Swiss National Day, we decided to attend the celebrations. A couple of tables were enough to seat all attendants, and there were few young faces among them. But there was home-made cake and sausages for sale (the proceeds was intended for the renovation of the valley’s only ski lift), a woman sang some traditional songs, kids were clutching their lampions and in the end, someone even  lighted a volcano.

They are few, but determined to stay.

Protected: A Glimpse into My New York Apartment

This post is password protected. To view it please enter your password below:

Password: