Part 14 - Delivery (of packages)

Addie just finished her first week of maternity leave. She started (and finished) a book. And ordered settling-in materials for our apartment. We experienced four different ways of receiving packages.

Method #1: Find an Amazon dropbox.

This seems simple enough. Go to the address of the box. Put in your details. Grab your stuff. Enjoy your day. Until you go to the address listed and there’s no box there. And you’re in a crowded plaza with a reputation for being dangerous. And you ask a woman who works in the train station convenience store if there’s a dropbox for Amazon packages nearby. When she tells you that “there is no such thing as Amazon dropboxes in this city,” you start to feel like maybe this is not going to be so simple after all.

So then, the next day, you walk with your partner who ordered the stuff. You go to a second address that populated on Google Maps for the same dropbox. It’s on the other side of the plaza you visited yesterday. You go into a second store and ask if there’s a dropbox nearby. You receive blank stares and confused shrugs.

So… you remember a different name that flashed across a screen when you were researching how this is supposed to work. You find a hit a couple blocks away in Google Maps and walk there. There’s an employee there for the company that manages the boxes. He says this is the only box around, so if there’s a package coming, it’s probably coming right here.

Interesting, because it’s not the name of the dropbox provided by Amazon. So now you’re in a pickle. Do you change the order, or hope you can find the box when the items arrive? Or try one more search in the plaza, behind the construction zone?

Voila. Fourth time was the charm and we found it. Go to (not quite) the address the box. Put in your details. Grab your stuff. Enjoy your day.

And what were the all important first Amazon items: laundry detergent, an HDMI cord, an Android device for work, a case, and a necklace chain.

Two of those items have already been returned.

Method #2: Delivery to the door.

We ordered IKEA furniture. They are quite aggressive online that the customer must reserve a 15m parking space within 15m of the apartment door. Also that deliveries won’t be made up into an apartment. Only piled into the ground floor.

We have no idea how to reserve a parking space here, but we do know there’s a delivery zone on the block. It’s only available until 6pm, which was well within our initial delivery window. Addie watched the delivery like a hawk. We felt we really needed this stuff so that we could use the weekend to set it up. With about 7 weeks to go until baby is expected, there aren’t that many opportunities for do-overs even with Addie out of work.

So we were watching. And waiting. Every ten minutes we got another alert that our estimated delivery had shifted ten minutes later. All the way until our original window was in the rearview mirror.

Speaking of rearview mirrors, this particular delivery truck is lucky to still have them. The entryway to our apartment building is on the second floor. The living space is split, with kitchen and social space on the building’s third floor. The entry to the building is at a bus stop. On a busy, but small, city street.

As with most small, city streets, just after 6pm is a congested mess. Enter a delivery box truck going the wrong way and backing up to edge of the bus stop, with a bus due in two minutes. Then a mad dash shuffling twelve boxes, of varying weights, into a building in the pouring rain. In the meantime, the incoming bus swerves into its oncoming traffic and then pulls forward into the nearby intersection to execute its stop. Then the delivery truck is gone, traffic clears, and there’s a piles of several hundred pounds of plywood and cardboard in a tile lobby.

Now we have some storage cubes and a nice dresser. What a relief.

Method #3: Delivery to a clothing outlet.

Amazon delivers packages to dropoff points throughout the city, if you can find them. IKEA delivers to your door. Pet supply stores have their own mechanic. Their shipping partners drop off at various storefronts around town. On my scouting trip, I found the storefront we had selected. It’s a chic clothing outlet. I was pretty confused. So I asked the attendant if this was a package pickup spot. He asked what courier and then he was confused as I tried to muddle my way through an explanation that I wasn’t quite sure and that my package wasn’t due until later in the week anyhow.

Later in the week we returned and collected our 10 kg bag of dog kibble. The woman who retrieved the package brought it forward, looked at Addie’s sizable bump, and said “It’s not easy. Not for you.”

And now the dog has food until Bump B joins us.

Method #4: A bonus delivery to the door.

Amazon delivers to the dropboxes around town. Except for when they don’t. Sometimes, it seems, the dropboxes are full. Or the dimensions of your box are too large. In these cases, the Amazon interface won’t let you select a dropbox and you just have to hope like hell that they’ll figure out how to get your package to your door. It turns out that if you leave instructions to call upon arrival, at least one driver will. And they’ll wait for you at the door so they can collect a confirmation code.

There is a fifth method that may be called for later: just changing the delivery address to one of the shipping destinations around town, but we’re hopeful four will be enough to see us through.

A few closing thoughts

It was a hectic week of spending money and collecting stuff to realize the value of that money spent. We were successful.

On Thursday evening, I felt at home for the first time since we arrived here more than six weeks ago. Obviously collecting stuff helped, but I think the more important bit is that Addie and I problem solved together. We shopped together, and collected the stuff together (which was more of an ordeal than either of us were expecting).

So much of the first five weeks here we were isolated on parallel paths. Addie working at her new job, in a new country. Me trying to get us settled while also working a new half-job. Those isolated paths converged over the course of Week Six and we stacked up some significant wins.

I got news during the week that my professional activities are registered with the national social security office– an important formal confirmation because that also provides access to the national health system. The smell in the downstairs bathroom disappeared, with some help from a nice Italian maintenance man. A new leak was sprung and repaired by that same nice man. We found a taste of home via Five Guys, Burgers and Fries. And Addie cooked her first home meal in this apartment’s small oven. It was a tasty butternut squash, pork and orzo medley with melted garlic Boursin cheese topped with steamed broccoli and seasoned with sage and herbes de provence.

We’ll be eating it as we roll into Week Seven and keep up the momentum of feeling more at home in our new world over here in the old world.

To finish this post where it started, the book Addie crushed was The Women by Kristin Hannah. She liked it. Less than The Great Alone, but more than Firefly Lane. We agree that The Nightingale is… untouchable and is as near the perfect book as a reader is likely to get. Alas, the search goes on.

We also watched Ted Lasso, Season Four together. It’s delightful.