Boxes

Our shipment finally arrived at the end of last week, and we have been living among boxes - over 200 of them - since then. We are slowly, slowly, making progress, unpacking and organising.

Here is a little story about getting our shipment stuff cleared through customs.

We are "returning residents" which basically means we get no "rights" at all, except the right to bring in a shipment of household goods duty free. Household goods means furniture, clothes, books, etc, and also extends to most small and large appliances. The only things that we knew we would have to pay customs duty on were a few electronic things like our DVD player.

When we got the breakdown of charges payable from the shipping company representative, it included customs duty on our sukkah frame. (We have one of those metal click-together sukkahs, just like the Israelites in the desert used). Peri was on the phone with the shipping company woman at the time (she deals with all these things because I can't, not because my Hebrew isn't good enough but because I would end up shouting and getting hung up on too many times - see previous blog post re the policeman in Modiin!) Well, when I realised what was going on, it just got too much for me. I started shouting at the phone: "what, a sukkah isn't considered a household good in Israel? This is the Jewish state for crying out loud! How can you claim that a sukkah frame isn't a household good? In Nazi Germany I can understand that they'd charge you customs duty on it, but this is Israel" and so on and so on.

Bottom line: we paid the duty. I am banned from the telephone.