Sending books from China

I was once told by an employee of the Chinese postal service that one should never send books book-rate to the United States. He chuckled as he told me they would never get there. I had asked Gina to get two books for me last time she went to China, but had forgotten to tell her about the no-book-rate rule. So she sent the two books book-rate at a cost of 85 RMB (US $10) on November 20, 2005. Today (June 28, 2006) the package arrived:



Notice how the package is open and I didn't even have to open it. Another interesting thing about the package is that I didn't have to empty it either. It was already empty (as noted in red by the US postal service: "Received without content"):



If you think about it, it's a win-win situation: the Chinese postal system gets to make money selling the contents of my package and I am freed of the burden of opening and emptying the package myself. The one suggestion I would make to the Chinese postal system is that they consider saving themselves a little bit of time and effort by simply throwing out the package after it has been opened rather than take the trouble to pass it on to the U.S. postal system.