China Post

Since a friend wasn't home when the mailman tried to deliver mail to her, I took her to the post office today to show her where to get mail. Well, where to try to get mail, anyway. I haven't had a hard time getting mail, except for one note from a friend. Packages have been delivered to my door before, or I've had a note delivered telling me to go to my apartment complex's main office. Once a note was put on the inside of the elevator, and I kept riding the other elevator, so that package took a couple extra days to get! Yet another time, I had to come to the post office to pick up a package.

After arriving at the post office, in order to pick up a package or letter, we had to walk around to the back, and there are three doors, none of which are labeled. We walked in the first one, were sent to the second door, only to be sent back to the first. Last time I had to go to the third door first. When we first walked in the door, we were greeted by this:
When we finally figured out which room to go into, we had to wait for our district's mail carrier to come back from her route, because apparently she's the only one who can give us our mail. While we were waiting, we watched the sorters shuffle through the day's mail. I'm sure there's some sort of method to the madness...

Once the mail is sorted and put in the little boxes, I guess it goes here:
After 45 minutes, our mail carrier came back and dug through her bag, which had a letter that had arrived with an attempted delivery on 11/19. I'm not quite sure why she's been carrying ti around every day since then, but I didn't ask questions! When she found out where we lived, she proceeded to look through all her mail for any mail belonging foreigners that lived in the same or neighboring apartment complexes. With a copy of my friend's passport, we were given all their mail, as long as we knew them!

I love getting packages and notes in the mail, and today reminded me that it's amazing that it makes it at all!