Our "stuff" from home

We had received a call from our removalist company advising that our 8 cartons with all of our wordly possessions (well the ones we decided to ship over here) had arrived and would be delivered to us very soon. This was very exciting news for J in particular as it meant that she would soon have her treasured cooking implements and pots/pans, etc, along with our music CD's and DVD movies, books, and a bunch of other belongings.

Well, as it turned out, our cartons from Australia hadn't actually arrived as we were first led to believe - they were somewhere in China due to something the Chinese customs authorities didn't like about their contents. Now, why they were in China in the first place was a bit of a mystery, however our freight forwarders assured us they were onto it and would have it resolved quickly...that was 4 days earlier...and a total of 4 weeks since they were picked up from us in Adelaide. This was supposed to be air freight and therefore much quicker than sea freight.

Over the next couple of weeks, I made numerous phone calls back to our Australian removalists, sent e-mails, and generally started to panic about where our stuff was. This was all happening within a few days of the start of the Olympics in Beijing and we were becoming increasingly concerned that once the Olympics started we would never see our cartons.

Finally we received encouraging news - the Chinese authorities had now cleared our cartons and they were on the way to us here in Dubai. This actually took about another 7 days, but nevertheless they finally arrived, a tad over 6 weeks after they had been picked up in Adelaide. And J proudly announced after un-packing everything that we had no casualties.

J spent a lot of time unpacking and attempting to find somewhere to put everything. We both wondered why we decided to ship so much stuff over, but this is in hindsight and we will just have to live with it now. We ended up buying a small bookcase from Ikea to accommodate books, magazines CD's and DVD's.

Now all I need to do is to take up with the removalist/freight forwarder the issue of having paid for airfreight and receiving sea freight service...