So, Saturday's mail haul:
That's quite a bit in one day, even for us, but it includes: a letter from immigration about my visa extension (conveniently written only in Dutch, as was the renewal form), a Hallowe'en card from my mom, a giant surprise pack of cross-stitch stuff from Mel (thank you and yay!), and a card and enclosed postcard from Jessi (with the postcard very entertainingly addressed "in the Netherlands, up a bunch of stairs").
We get a lot more mail here than I ever did in Canada. There are a couple of reasons for that. First, I think the mail delivery bikes sometimes deliver mail to our address more than once a day. We live about two blocks away from the depot, so I think they have to go past our house quite often, so sometimes they'll take new mail that's come in during the day and drop it off on their way. On a side note, yes, in the cities, the mail carriers do indeed bike, and they often don't get off to drop the mail in the boxes. It's very impressive. Second, the previous tenant didn't bother to change all his addresses, so we still get some of his catalogues and, every month without fail, his cellphone bill. I now toss those straight in the recycling bin, after several months of giving them to the property management company to forward, and then several more months of dropping them back in the mailbox after writing (in Dutch) variations of "moved" on them. Third, Dutch companies greatly enjoy sending mail. Generally, letters here take one or maybe two days to deliver domestically, and they often send you a letter to notify you, for example, that a file has been opened, or (on more than one occasion, from both the city and the tax office) that they will be sending you a letter in a couple of days. Like the immigration letter: all it says is that they've received my renewal form, which I sent them over a month ago, and that they'll have an answer for me within six months, and hopefully by January 3, 2012 (a whole ten days before my visa expires). If you need six months to process these things, why would you only send out the renewal form four months before the visa expires? Weird.
Anyway, back to my original point. Fourth and finally, we get mail from home. Which I greatly appreciate, although my collection of unfinished crossword puzzles is now depressingly high, because apparently I just can't do them fast enough.
So, how long does mail take to get here, or to get from here to Canada? The answer is: as long as Canada Post feels like. At a minimum, a week, and usually letter mail is here within ten days. That giant package of cross-stitch stuff, for example, took seven days to get here (based on the date on the label), and my mom's card took eight days. But sometimes, things take even longer. I've sent small packages or bigger envelopes back that took three or more weeks, and had letters take more than two weeks to get through. And that's still not the worst. Last year, Stefan's sister tried to send baking: it arrived nearly two months later, and the box looked like it had been through a shredder. Canada Post again: once it got to Europe, it got to us within three days, but it spent more than six weeks sitting in a depot in Montreal. Yeah, I don't know either.
And all that's assuming that the mail can find us. The post office is fine, usually, but some of the courier companies apparently don't update their GPS while relying entirely on it for deliveries. The houses must have been recently renumbered, so not everyone's GPS tells them that our house number exists. We've learned this by ordering things online. Amazon can find me, and so can Ikea and several of the department stores, but the big online shoe store here returned my order and claimed my address didn't exist. Except, of course, it does! The same thing happened with our moving boxes last year. Apparently it's a common problem. It's all those stairs, you see ;)
Anything else anyone's been wondering about life over here? I'll happily ramble about whatever it is, and all you have to do is ask...
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