Packing up.

Yesterday morning at 09:00 a two man packing crew arrived and started boxing up our belongings. They worked pretty quickly to move through our main room and bedroom, but then seemed to slow down once they hit the back room and attacked packing up the bikes.
They stopped for lunch and then returned to finish up with packing all of our kitchen supplies. All together it probably took them 4 hours to get everything wrapped, packed, properly documented, and loaded onto a truck.
The guards at the gate didn't want to let them leave, even though we had a letter from our landlord stating that he knew we were moving out. They wanted the letter to be stamped from the complex office, and when I went down there they gave me some grief because we hadn't paid them the management fees for December yet, and they thought that we were leaving that day. Once they knew we would be around for another week it was no problem and off our stuff went to the warehouse to get crated.

When we talked to the move coordinator today we found out that Xiamen changed it's export policy and when they got to the warehouse with all 32 boxes customs asked them how many items were in each box. They spent 4 hours last night opening all of our items to count each item, write it down, and then repack them.

Today we had the fun of going down to customs so that they could spot check through our stuff. At least that's what we thought was going to happen, instead Tina and I spent a few hours watching people fill out paperwork. Tina finally left when we were told that they only needed my passport and signature, and that it would probably be a few more hours before everything was done. Ten minutes after she leaves they gather up all the paperwork and head upstairs where a customs official looks at my passport and then proceeds to stamp their paperwork. "That's it, we are done now." So much for a few hours and looking at items, just a quick glance and everything is all set.

It sounded good but once I got back and started working the phone rang with "We need you to come back so we can look at your passports, we need to verify things..." So about 2 hours later I'm back in another customs building waiting for some guy in a suit to stamp some paperwork.

All set now, our stuff is supposedly waiting to be shipped without any more issues, and we get to relax for our final week in a sadly empty house...