Time Warp: Moscow Central Post Office

Alison:

As we continue to pack and purge, we realized that we did not want to drag books and our winter clothes on the next leg of our journey. Solution: ship it home. After a confusing visit to our local post office, conveniently located downstairs, I found out that if you want to ship to America, you need to go to the central Moscow post office at the Chisty Prudy Metro station. So I packed three bags of books, grabbed tape, a scissors and a Sharpie and headed out.

Visits to municipal offices here in the Russian capital are usually an adventure, and this was no exception. The building looked reasonably Soviet enough, and there were many unhappy workers behind the counter. We must be in the right place, so we just jumped on the nearest queue and hoped for the best. That's our usual technique.

In short order, a postal worker looked at our package while I muttered something like "kaneegee b California" ("books to California") and we were off. She took our package, weighed it and then took the 6KG stack behind the counter and began to wrap it. Yes, wrap it, in kraft paper. No boxes, no tape. Just string and paste. We were instructed where precisely to put our addresses.

Fortunately, a young Muscovite was there to help translate "sea or air" - we opted for "sea" although now I'm wondering if that means our package will wind up at the bottom of the sea. She then grabbed a huge pile of stamps, glued them from an actual pot of glue, took our 1,000 ruble note and we waved goodbye to the package.

All I can say is I wish I had taken my video camera.