On Sep 5, 2005, at 13:28, [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Robin) wrote:
I don't know about lace mailing, but I used to have to mail natural history specimens on loan to researchers at other museums. The law regarded our sending *our* specimens on *loan* outside the country as "exporting" and the return of *our* specimens to *us* as "importing". We were subject to all the rules governing export and import of animals and "animal products",
Sorry.... The following really should have gone on chat, but Robin doesn't subscribe to it and it's priceless, IMO...
41 yrs ago, my Mother and I travelled to Hungary for the summer. While there, she saw a place which sold "real" (ceramic, not plastic) tiles (plain, bland, white). Unavailable in Poland at that time, but something she'd been dreaming of for years... So she phoned my father, had him measure the bathtub, then bought enough tiles to encase it, then bought a separate suitcase to carry the loot... No problem leaving Hungary (we travelled by train), no problem transiting through Czechoslovakia...
We get to the Polish border, and the customs officer can't believe his eyes; what on earth??? :) He flips his big book back and forth, and can't find "tiles, ceramic" in the imports section... My Mother's sugestion that, perhaps, tiles are free of duty, gets no more than a scorning snort from him; he's too clued in about the tricks travellers try to pull...
Half an hour later (and the train sits there, waiting), he licks his pencil (the purple kind - anyone still remember those? I used to write with them, then moisten a piece of toilet paper and, carefully, dab-dab-dab over all the text, but most people licked the tip to release the colour for the next half of the word. Inefficient. As well as unhealthy, though we didn't know that at the time), and writes: "One kitchen stove, disassembled", and writes a ticket for something like 15 cents duty...
My Mother took a pinch of my thigh early on in the procedure and kept turning it till it hurt... Else I'd have offended the guy by laughing, and we might have been charged with duty for "palace, marble, disassembled" <g> And, if you think that *American* customs are idiocy-immune... In spring of '74, my dowry arrived, including the printed linen fabric intended for the living room curtains. The customs officer in Baltimore (where the ship off-loaded) had no idea how to assess the charges, but knew he had to assess something :) I think we settled on something like : "10 dresses, to be made" :) Of course, by 23, I had more sense than at 14, so didn't laugh, even though Severn (DH) didn't pinch me very hard...
-- Tamara P Duvall http://t-n-lace.net/ Lexington, Virginia, USA (Formerly of Warsaw, Poland) - To unsubscribe send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] containing the line: unsubscribe lace [EMAIL PROTECTED] For help, write to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
