When visiting China in October of last year, I found myself in a supermarket. I like visiting supermarkets in foreign countries, as despite globalisation, imports, and exports, there are still many products that are produced and only available locally, and a supermarket tells you far more about the culture and consumption habits of normal people than anything you would learn by (say) going to a restaurant.
For instance, China is now one of the world’s top ten (in terms of volume, at least) wine producers. Chinese wine is not generally seen anywhere outside China, but is very readily available in China. The producers have even mastered putting some mixture of faux-Frenchness and Chinese clicheness on the labels.
I suppose, at least, we were spared a panda.
I suspect that they may not realise that “vin de table” on a French wine label means approximately “This is bad wine” (ie it failed the quality control tests that exist under French wine laws and which would have allowed the winemakers to put anything else on the label), but in the case of most Chinese wine it is for the moment fairly appropriate.
However, I digress. While Chinese wine can be made fun of a little, there are other products at which the Chinese are indeed the experts. It was not long ago that China was principally known in the west for its tea, and although China now produces and sells many other things, the country still produces and consumes truly vast quantities of the stuff. When I was in the supermarket in Shenzhen, I found seemingly most of an aisle devoted to the stuff.
This happened to be convenient, as my sister happens to enjoy interesting and exotic teas. My thoughts were immediately that I would buy a couple of packets of some of the more interesting teas in the shop, and ultimately send them to her as a Christmas gift. I purchased them, and took them back to England with me.
I rather failed to get my act together in December, and as a consequence, on December 31 I posted a package containing tea to my sister from Clapham Junction post office in London to the Blue Mountains near Sydney in Australia, along with various other parcels that I posted at the same time. I made a deliberately vague statement on the customs declaration sticker. Australia has amazingly (and at times idiotically) strict quarantine regulations, and it is possible that the unauthorised importation of tea is prohibited.
Thus when my sister told me last week that she had not received anything from me, I was not completely surprised. I had visions of Australian customs office going through enormous stacks of mail with large Alsations looking for illicit tea, and the package sent to my sister being confiscated by some stern official with a moustache.
However, as it turned out, I was imagining things. The truth, to the extent that I have discovered it, was far stranger than that. This morning, my sister received a package with my handwriting on the envelope and my return address on the back. One side of the envelope had been ripped open, and had been sealed again with plastic tape. Attached to the envelope was a sticker from Canada Post, stating (in both English and French)
Package found damaged, torn, or opened and officially repaired.
Adressee:
If liability coverage applies, please contact Canada Post on 1-800-267-1177 or www.canadapost.ca
Please note the packaging and contents may be required.
When my sister opened the envelope, it contained a data CD entitled ‘Canon Step Up Photography – Accessories to enhance your creativity’ for Windows and Macintosh, but no tea.
Okay, I can just about imagine that some mail was damaged and the postmen had difficulty figuring out what had fallen out of which envelope. But what in the name of Micklethwait was the package doing in Canada in the first place?
In all, I think this has to go down as my oddest experience since the time a French policeman called me in my flat in London from a village in the Pyrenees to ask if I was lonely. If people ask nicely, I will tell that story next week.
Also, I am intrigued as to what happened to the tea. Perhaps the mysterious world odyssey of this product that was never intended to leave China is continuing, and it has somehow, Teela Brown style, found its way to South America, or is somehow plotting its way to the far side of the galaxy in search of Arthur Dent.
I have had the experience of loose Chinese tea (actually from Taiwan) being misidentified as a somewhat more potent psychoactive agent.
As for the French French policeman story: please, sir, do tell!
Well, no. If you find a pack of bottles with a white label called “Cola” in Tesco, it means it’s cheaper and less elaborate than Coke or Pepsi.
Both products exist because of supply and demand economics.
The French laws are so baroque that I would have to say that they departed from anything to do with supply and demand economics, some time ago.
However, although “Honest, day to day drinking wine” was what the “vin de table” classification was originally intended to mean, there has been sufficient classification inflation that pretty much anyone in France who makes vaguely decent wine has had it classified as something else. In particular, the wines from the vast areas in the south west who produce honest, day to day drinking wines tend to be “vin de pays” at least, and there are many many lesser wines that now have AOC status as well. “Vin de table” tends to be either pretty ghastly bulk stuff produced for EU subsidy purposes rather than actual drinking, or appellation wine that has failed quality control. So I pretty much stand by what I said.
The situation with “Vino da tavola” in Italy is completely different, however, although it is the precise legal equivalent under EU wine law.
Intercepting international mail is all part of creeping Canadian World Domination.
I’m curious to know what wine a with six exclamation marks in its name tastes like.
As for my fun story with the (US) postal service, back in 1999 I sent a letter to Radio Slovakia International, ending the address, “Bratislava, Slovak Republic”. A few days later, I get the letter back, with a stamped message telling me I’m supposed to put the name of the country in English. So, I added “Slovakia” to the last line, and took the letter to the post office, whereupon the clerk told me that mail deliveries to Slovakia had been suspended because there was a war on!
Pretty please!!!
This somewhat puts into perspective my recent befuddlement at being asked to write on the envelope the value of the home-made DVD I was sending to Australia. Aware that dividing the price of the pack of ten blank DVDs by 10 ceased to be the correct answer the minute I’d burned my boring movie onto the DVD, I proceeded to have an internal debate with myself about the concept of value right there in the post office, much to the exasperation of the clerk.
I’d also love to hear about the French policeman.
I live in Downer, ACT (Australian Capital Territory), in, you guessed it, Australia.
There is a village near, or suburb of, Wien in Oesterrich – Vienna in Austria – of the same name, Downer.
About 1/3 of parcels posted through the US Post Office carefully marked DOWNER AUSTRALIA used to go via DOWER AUSTRIA before reaching me.
This stopped after I advised the sender to add SOUTHERN HEMISPHERE as the last line of the address.
There is a Sydney in Nova Scotia so I suspect your parcel ended up there. About a year ago a woman from Argentina was supposed to fly to Sydney Australia but the ticket she purchased on line was to Sydney Nova Scotia. Now Sydney NS is a small place and she did wonder why she was on such a small plane and why it was so cold. Some locals took her under their care, warm clothes etc as she could not afford to buy a ticket to Australia. I think she stayed in Canada until her return ticket kicked in and enjoyed her stay. Some noble citizens of Sydney NS got to improve their Spanish.
My eye witness account of the confiscation from a passenger at Heathrow airport, in 2002, of the multi-lingual *cardboard packaging* of some Whittard of Chelsea brand “Gunpowder Tea” (the loose leaf Chinese tea itself was handed back in an unlabeled, unsealed, plastic bag) , was the runner up in the “Most Egregiously Stupid” category of Privacy International’s Stupid Security Contest of 2003.
WTWY: I love the fact that the winner is “The Australian Government” for a list of things too long and too stupid to actually detail. One of the virtues of being so isolated is that they are extremely good at misinterpreting documents and/or just making things up and then proclaiming how this is done at “an international level”.
Globalization or Globalisation has become a buzzword in the new era of international relations. Basically, it is a process of expanding trade and commerce all over the world by creating a border-less market. But it has had a far reaching effect on many aspects of life. With the development of sophisticated communications media, rapid technological progress, and rapid transportation facilities, the world has come closer. We can now learn in an instant what is happening in the farthest corner of the world and travel to any country in the shortest possible time. Countries of the world are like families in a village. They can even share their joys and sorrows like next-door neighbors. If one country is in distress, others can immediately come to its assistance. If we can build up an atmosphere of mutual understanding and co-operation through this Globalization process, our world could certainly be a better place to live in.