I've had good luck with USPS internationally, including shipping CDs
to soviet union, when there was still such a thing.

All bets are off shipping something to India, though.  I tried
shipping something to my son a few months back when he was in
Kottayam, Kerala Province, and it was a comedy of errors -- overnight
shipping ended up taking weeks, the US express freight carrier not
knowing the local phone # for their India branch, the delivery guy
taking the package out and not finding the house*... in the end my son
took a rickshaw ride to a creepy industrial neighborhood to pick it up
from the shipper's office.

*Apparently street names and numbers are a US/Northern European
innovation.  In Kottayam, your address is your family's name and the
nearest post office. Express shippers, unlike the postmen who work a
particular neighborhood, don't have the location of every family's
house memorized. So unless your package is addressed to a business in
town, the delivery guy drives around the neighborhood asking random
people on the street if they know where so and so lives.

Apparently shipping FROM India is an even bigger adventure, involving
hiring a tailor to sew your box into a canvas wrapper and seal the
seams with wax, and buying hundreds of small denomination stamps and
covering all surfaces of your box with them.

Reply via email to