The marital property and I went to the post office the other day to mail some packages home. We mailed home some extra clothes and books - editions of Latin classics with facing translations in Italian are dirt cheap here relative to what they might be in the States. For example, I got all of Augustine's Confessions in one book for 13.50E while the English equivalent (the Loeb) comes in 2 volumes at 24.00US each! What a savings! Without the extra volume of clothes and books, I can potentially still carry on my guitar on whatever flights we wind up making and thus bring it home, instead of leaving 120E worth of pure acoustic guitar power behind somewhere to be stolen or broken.

To mail packages required going to the post office. If you want to skip reading the rest of the post, just imagine what going to the post office would be like if it were run by the DMV instead, and in Italian. Seriously.

We walked about 5 minutes, carrying two packages (later determined to weigh 6 and 9 kg). Katina carried one. I carried the other. We made it to the closest post office. We took a number. We waited 10 minutes for the woman to help 1 person. Then we began the process. She didn't like the way our box looked. So she made us put some tape on it. Then she made us weigh it. Then she looked at the box some more. Then she asked if we wanted to send it by air. That was very expensive. Then she asked if we wanted to send it by sea. Much cheaper. I said yes. She said, "Too bad! I am out of that form. Bye."

We left the first post office for the central branch. Katina carried one package. I carried the other. Then we fought about which post office to visit next. I insisted there was another small one on the way. Katina insisted we go straight to the mothership of PosteItaliane. Then she said she couldn't carry her package any more. Then I demanded she give me her package. She refused. We walked on. She said her box was too heavy. I stopped and refused to go on until she gave it to me. So she did. Thirty seconds later she snatched it out of my arms and insisted on carrying it the rest of the way. We argued about this. Then we reached a point where I was unsure whether to go left or right. First I thought left. Then right. Then Katina said she was sure it was right. Three steps later I knew we were on the wrong street. So we turned around. Then we bickered more and she called our trip a "death march." I told her that she could give me her package any time she wanted. She refused. After much walking and lugging, we finally reached the post office.

But, wait! There's more!

The line system at the post office is complicated by the fact that there are 3 or 4 possible transactions at the Poste: send mail, retrieve mail, something about sending or exchanging money, fax or telegram service. So when you arrive, you push a button on a machine that spits out a ticket with a letter or a number. Ours was E464. They were serving E425 we arrived. We were finally able to set down our boxes. In the Poste, the people were waiting, waiting, waiting. So were we. We were waiting, waiting, waiting. I saw someone I recognized from the archive. We were all waiting, waiting, waiting.

As we stood around for nearly an eternity, an old woman with a kerchief around her head approached me and showed me her ticket. "How long do I have to wait," she asked.

ASIDE
This happens more frequently than I would have expected - people asking me for help or instructions or directions here in Genoa. This baffles me, because I imagine that I must look obviously foreign. Who wants directions from a foreigner? Either the answer is "everyone" or I blend in better than I thought. Once a man leaned out of a fifth story window as I walked below and asked me if I would go around the corner to see if the Latteria (milk / milk-product shop) was open. It wasn't.
/ASIDE

I tried to pretend not to understand the old woman on account of being foreign. She insisted and repeated herself. I looked at her ticket. It said A456. Then I looked at the electronic board. It said A42. I said, "I don't know." She didn't buy this any more than she did my claims of foreign ignorance and repeated herself again. So I told her, "Your ticket says A456. The board says A42." She said, "Will it be about twenty minutes?" I said, "I don't know." Then some other people distracted her attention and I attempted to position myself to avoid a repeat performance by turning away and looking in a different direction.

What I saw when I looked there was a group of four middle-aged Italians digging through the trash can to find slips of paper with lower numbers than the ones they had in their hands while some dude who looked like middle-aged Biff Tanner from Back to the Future (only with shoulders about 5 feet wide) railed on and on about the rapaciousness of the government at Genoa and how they were robbing him blind but couldn't even make the post office work properly. On and on he went. The people were waiting, waiting, waiting.

Then the board showed E 460. The people were waiting, waiting, waiting. It was almost time. So we moved up to the front, near the desks and waited some more before having our number called. Thank the patron saint of bureaucracy that we got a friendly woman, because this last stage could have been the most arduous of all. Both packages had to be weighed, and then their contents had to be inventoried. The woman asked what was in them. I said, "books." She wrote, "libri." Then I said, "Clothes." She stopped, and asked, "Used or new clothes?" I said, "Used." She said something in Italian I didn't catch but it seemed to suggest that customs officials had a problem with either the exportation or importation of used clothing (?) so it was better to just leave it at books. Then she wanted to know how much the contents of the boxes were worth. I shrugged and said, "maybe 50 Euros?" Then the woman wrote 40 Euros on the form, tore the carbon copy off the rear and affixed it to the first package, then did the same for the second. She was even nice enough to mail some postcards for us on top of it all. And then we left, thankful that our marriage and our backs were still intact.

The End