CanadaPost nightmare

Yesterday was a long, hard, frustrating day. After two days of surfing (and lots and lots of bruising), M. and I decided to take a day off from the beach and do some shopping. We headed out to Denpasar's big art market early in order to get some "lucky morning prices". The Balinese feel that they're first sell of the day will bring them luck, so they will bring down their prices a lot faster than later on in the day. Then, once they make the sale, they use the money earned to bless the rest of their merchandise by running the money over it. Getting prices to go down is an essential part of shopping in Bali, you can usually get the price down to less than half it's original! (and still... you're probably paying way too much!)

Anyways, we armed ourselves with a lot of patience and tenacity and did all of our shopping in one morning -- hours of haggling, over-packed stores upon over-packed stores, dodging the 'over-friendly' helpers that simply need to bring us to their friend's store of the best prices -- but we survived!


The next step in our plan was to send ourselves packages with all the gifts and souvenirs we bought. A lot easier said than done. We headed to Denpasar's main post office where I had previously sent myself a package on our first day here (full of New Zealand's winter gear). The line moved fast and we started packing up our purchases when all of a sudden we learned that sending packages to Canada was a no-go. Why? Nobody could say. I remembered that my aunt had mentioned that Canada post was going on strike, so we figured that might be it. Meanwhile, we had 5 kilos each of purchases that simply couldn't fit in our backpacks. Yikes. The next few hours were spent hopping in and out of cabs going from one post agency to another (UPS, FedEx, etc. types). Unsurprisingly, these were way over priced: 300$ per package! Another dead-end.

Frustrated and quite defeated we made our way back to Legian, too tired even to surf. Instead we decided to go find an internet cafe in order to purchases plane tickets we need in order to get home. Of course, most of the sites were either out of order or they didn't accept internet purchases. Arrgh!

Still, all this has a happy ending. This morning we woke up, went surfing, managed to send our packages using Canada post (the strike was a local thing that didn't affect international packages, we just needed to convince the Indonesians to accept our parcels, hopefully they arrive safe and sound!), and bought our plane tickets using a travel agent. All before 1pm. Now that's a great turn around! Sorry for my earlier rant.