first weekend at Intervale

Mike, Paprika

shipping cargo from Argentina

our stuff arrives in a big truck!

This is most of it. It doesn’t even look like that much stuff!

We had all our stuff shipped to Maine from Buenos Aires, Argentina, by cargo freight ship! It took a long time and caused lots of stress but it was cheap and … miraculously, here’s our stuff! delivered to our doorstep. Arrived on Wednesday, right on time!

A few people have asked us for details about how we shipped all our cargo from Argentina home to the United States, so here’s the nitty gritty, as much of it as I can recall: We used a shipping agent called Pluscargo Argentina. Our contact person there was Agustina Villanueva. I don’t know if I would recommend it… we were looking for the rock-bottom-cheapest price quote, which is why we went with PlusCargo. We explained that we could handle EVERY aspect of the shipping, all the tramites and paperwork and packing and transportation and everything, except for the actual cargo ship. So we asked for a cheap price and bare-bones service and that is what we got! It ended up being really complicated and pretty stressful, my spanish is pretty good so I was able to navigate a confusing maze of bureaucracy and paperwork, though it took a LOT of time and energy. The worst problem was that our shipping agent never really explained to us what we needed to actually do! She was just like “OK, here’s the name of your ship and the departure date, you do the rest” and didn’t always answer phone calls or emails when I asked her to explain more. So I was bouncing around from one agency to another, asking questions and begging everyone to help me out and tell me what to do! This process is normally handled by shipping agents who know the whole process and are friendly with everyone involved and take care of all the paperwork, so it’s very strange for a person like me to show up in the customs office with no contacts and idea what I’m doing. If you decide to go with a bare-bones service like this, it will probably help you a lot to actually know what the steps are:

• you need to pack up all your stuff in boxes and estimate the volume (in cubic meters) of your items, in order to get a price quote from your shipping company. Use sturdy boxes, as they’ll be shipped in cargo containers on high seas. We used lots of bubble wrap and were very careful with fragile items. Wooden crates might be helpful. We did everything in cardboard boxes, some of them (containing clothes) were a bit smashed-up when they arrived but nothing was broken, even glass stuff arrived in one piece.
• you need to keep a detailed list of EVERY single item that is packed in your boxes. You will need to show this to customs.
• be careful with WOOD items such as furniture. Customs requires a certificate to prove they have been fumigated before they can enter the USA.
• be careful with ART of any kind. Whether it’s childrens’ drawings or a cheap magazine photo in a picture frame, anything that looks remotely like art, or anything in a frame, will raise red flags at customs. Argentina is very concerned about fine art being illegally removed from the country. You are supposed to contact some agency (perhaps affiliated with La UBA?) and show them photographs of every piece of art or framed picture you are transporting. They are specialists who certify that it’s NOT a valuable work of art (or if it is, they value it and you have to pay proper duties on it). People have said this is actually not such a difficult process, but we didn’t want to deal with it so we just took all of our “art” (nothing valuable) out of the frames and folded or rolled them or otherwise packed them up in a way that made them not look like valuable art.
• EMBA (Estación Marítima Buenos Aires) is the govt. agency that handles exporting personal effects. Their office is located down by the port, in the general area of Retiro – you probably will want to take a taxi over there, though you can walk from Retiro. Get the address from your shipping agent, I can’t remember it!
• your shipping agency should give you a checklist of tramites, from EMBA, that you must do, and documentation that you must provide. I forget all the stuff on it. You need to have an escribano certify a copy of your passport showing that you are a US citizen, and a copy of your working papers or residency papers or other evidence that you’ve been a legal resident of Argentina for at least one year (I was not a legal resident but my boyfriend DID have a working visa so we shipped everything in his name). You need copies of your list of what’s in your boxes. You need a booking sheet (from your shipping agent) that tells what freight company and what boat your stuff will be traveling on. And I think there were a few more…
• if you have a shipping agent who will handle the tramites for you, you will need to have an Escribano write up a form that gives your shipping agent the power to handle all duties related to exporting your personal effects for you. If you are going to do it all yourself, you don’t need this “poder.” The people in EMBA seem to work with an escribano named Emilio Perasso (Paraná 123 piso 7, 4372-4341) but after visiting his office twice, we finally figured out that we don’t need to work with him at all, since he handles the “poder” which we didn’t need to do. We went to a cheaper neighborhood escribano to have the residency & passport copies certified.
• discuss insurance with your shipping agency. We decided to forego it since we mostly were shipping things with emotional value but little monetary value. But for valuables I’m sure it would be a very good idea.
• your shipping agency should give you the name and address of a cargo-storage “deposito fiscal” down by the port that will receive your boxes and hold them until they are packed on the ship.
• once you’ve assembled all your paperwork, bring it in to EMBA at the port. Make sure you don’t go at lunchtime when everything is closed!! If they approve your paperwork they will send you across the street to a customs office that will take a copy of your packing list and make an appointment for you to have your boxes reviewed by a customs officer (he will come to meet you at the deposito fiscal and do the inspection there).
• talk to the deposito fiscal to find out exact procedures and hours to drop off your stuff. You should drop it around a week or at least a few days before the ship departure date.
• hire a flete (truck and driver) to pick up your boxes and bring you, and the boxes, down to the deposito fiscal. Again, make sure you avoid the lunch hour! We had a hell of a time with this step of the process, it ended up taking AN ENTIRE DAY because we were missing some certification from the customs officer so the deposito fiscal did not want to let us in. Again, they are accustomed to seeing familiar faces of shipping agents who normally handle this process, so they didn’t really know how to handle us and I think part of the delay was just them being like “who are you? what the hell? where’s your shipping agent?” We had to keep the flete waiting, on the clock, for like 6 hours while the whole thing got worked out. Again, you’ll need to present copies of all your paperwork at this stage.
• the customs officer should meet you at the deposito fiscal. You will need to fill out more paperwork and get a security badge to enter the storage facility with him. He and his team will open up about 25% of your carefully-packed boxes and rifle through your stuff to make sure it’s not contraband. He was very nice and they taped everything back up very carefully when they were done.
• Afterwards we got more papers and tracking numbers, confirming the cargo had been delivered to the deposito fiscal.
• then go pay the shipping company and give them copies of the papers from the deposito fiscal. We gave them our address in the USA where we wanted our boxes delivered, and they contracted with a US cargo transporter to have our boxes picked up at the port in New York and delivered by cargo truck to our address in Maine.
• Then … wait! It took about 6 weeks for our cargo to arrive at our doorstep in Maine. The US cargo company handled the customs paperwork on the US entry side, and charged us an additional fee for US customs clearance. The customs clearance took about a week, as our boxes got pulled out for special x-ray inspection and then further personal inspection by hand. The US company did complain that PlusCargo Argentina had not filled out their part of the paperwork correctly!
• The total price was around US$1000 for less than 1 cubic meter of cargo. I think we paid about $850 to PlusCargo and the rest to the company in NJ that handled our US customs clearance. This was only for shipping and handling and stuff, We did NOT have to pay any customs charges to the country of Argentina or to the USA, since we were able to prove that all our goods were just personal effects, nothing for sale.

If you have a little bit more money to spend, I would suggest seeking a slightly more full-service agency because this whole process gave me a lot of grey hairs and I might’ve rather spent my last days in Argentina drinking wine in San Telmo, not sweating in the cargo port. Although for me the hardest part was actually figuring out what we were supposed to do, since nobody would tell us all the steps and how to do them! Hopefully this info would be helpful for somebody else trying to navigate this maze on their own, and perhaps it wouldn’t be so difficult if you go into the process armed with this knowledge.

Here is another place we considered because they had a relatively low price quote. No idea if they’re any good or not. http://internicmovingservices.com/eurotransport/us_booking.php

Hope this helps anybody who’s thinking of trying to do the same thing!

Our first visit to the new house

our first visit to our new house! My mom made this beautiful banner out of paper towels and the letters cut out of feed sack. The house was very cold but exciting to see.

here, now

We’ve arrived in Maine at last! Got in to Boston mid-morning (beautiful snow falling all around) and made it to Gorham in the afternoon, after about 23 hours in transit. Feels like a miracle that we made it here. Dogs didn’t enjoy the flight, but are still alive and are now in high spirits. Today we went to SEE the house for the very first time! It was mostly just as I expected it, after seeing photos and videos. But I was really struck by how BIG and cold and messed-up it is. It’s like a maze that just goes on and on. The walls are basically totally uninsulated and it was bitter cold today. And it is a mess! A beautiful, rambling shambles. There is so much stuff left behind by the previous tenants; in the ruins of the upstairs ell apartment, the bathtub is filled with baby clothes, a large old beige computer monitor and a smallish plastic christmas tree. The fridge and freezer are still filled with stinking, eight-month old food. In other rooms their traces are fainter, just cigarette burns and half-painted walls. It’s weird and a bit creepy but oh, it’s ours, and filled with possibilities. The room that might be my studio is huge and has six windows and a beautiful peaked ceiling. The dogs went nuts running in the yard, Inga was careening around, crazed by more open grassy space than she’s ever seen in her life.

Back to Buenos Aires and then onwards again…

Finally back to our house in Buenos Aires for just two short weeks. So good to see the dogs after such a long absence! Inga didn’t recognize us, and thought we were tired, stinky burglars with large backpacks. Chris and Courtney had been dog/house sitting while we were gone, they were excited for our return because it meant that they could leave town and start their own big South American adventure. We were very excited to be on home ground and have good long hot showers in our own bathroom, wash our clothes, clean our blisters, eat good food, sleep long hours and generally regroup for a day before beginning the next leg of our crazy transformation.
Immediately after touching down in Buenos Aires, we had to start planning our attack for packing and cleaning and moving overseas! I had to catch up on a bit of work, so Mike handled most of the paperwork and bureaucracy related to bringing our dogs to the United States. We bought some boxes and bubble wrap, packing tape, and started furiously sorting and packing EVERYTHING in our house. We wanted to ship some boxes via container freight, but were uncertain whether it would be prohibitively expensive or impossible due to impenetrable mazes of paperwork and typical Argentine bureaucracy. As the designated Expert Spanish Speaker of the house, it fell to me to handle most of the phone conversations and paperwork surrounding this scary and stressful task. We basically had NO IDEA how to go about doing this. Everyone we talked to said “I can’t tell you what to do, you should talk to someone else.” Our bargain-priced shipping agent said “I’m not sure what you need to do, maybe you should talk to the people in the port.” We ventured down into the strange world of the shipping port in person, and the people in the port said “Your shipping agent needs to handle this for you.” When we said that our shipping agent had sent us to the port in the first place, the port agency told us to go see a public notary. We begged them to give us a recommendation for a notary who could help us; when we went to see that notary, they were perplexed by our needs and said “Tell your shipping agent to call us.” When we called the shipping agent, she said “I’ve never heard of this notary, I don’t work with them.” Ultimately, NOBODY would advise us about what we needed to do and how to do it, nor how much it would cost. And all of these conversations were in Spanish which made them 10% more confusing and frustrating! We could’ve gone with a full-service shipping agent but we didn’t want to pay for it so we’d chosen someone who gave us a rock-bottom price and offered absolutely no service other than giving us a cargo spot on a boat. So, despite great adversity, we did cobble together a terribly vague idea of what we kinda imagined that maybe we could try to do in order to get our stuff shipped. Nothing to do but try it, hope for the best, and see how it goes. After much labored sorting and organizing and packing and taping and bubble-wrapping, we had 38 small cardboard boxes plus one bike in a cardboard box, ready to go. We hired a van and driver to pick it up and drive us and our cargo down to the shipping port. It’s a strange no-man’s-land out there, beyond the edge of the known city, a kinda fascinating maze of mud roads and container stacks and shipping warehouses, populated by truck drivers and stevedores, shipping employees, forklift drivers and team captains, almost exclusively big burly industry men. Normally, shipping agents handle this side of the business and they all know the warehouse managers by name. We were the only disoriented and confused gringos in the whole port. We got totally lost driving around this maze and our poor driver was very patient as we made phone call after phone call to locate our specified warehouse complex. When we got there… bad luck, it was 11:45 and the whole place closes down for 2 hours for lunch break. They wouldn’t even let us through the door to drop our cargo. So we had to pay our driver by the hour to sit outside the door in the van with us for two long hours, waiting for all these guys to finish their lunch and let us in. When they finally got around to dealing with us, of course we were missing important papers that nobody had told us about… there were more phone calls and more hours of delays… finally we were admitted and our cargo weighed… in a giant warehouse filled with pallets of wine and flat-screen tv’s, we met a customs agent who ripped open a few boxes to make sure we were really exporting personal effects, not contraband. Bla, bla, bla, more hours of paperwork and confusion, finally after about 8 hours we got home with a stack of papers in spanish, to show that we’d left all our goods for shipment!
Then on to packing the suitcases and cleaning the apartment, farewell dinners and despedida parties, last dates with friends and a few quiet moments to enjoy our beautiful neighborhood and quiet terrace for the last time ever! Wednesday, March 3rd we left home at 5:00 pm with two dogs in travel crates and six suitcases, never to return again…

sorting and packing

I’m trying to sort through three years’ accumulated books and clothes and art supplies and papers and dust and junk and souvenirs and stuff! Once again I have to condense my worldly things down to two suitcases and maybe a few cardboard boxes (maybe we’ll be able to ship a few things in a container ship? still not sure if it’s affordable). This is alternately sad and exciting, tiresome and pleasurable. The truth is that I love stuff. And I hate to get rid of anything that I might want later. Which makes this kind of fun and also really difficult. I keep thinking that I might rather just stay in South America for the rest of my life rather than have to decide what to bring and what to leave behind. Sigh.

veranito

It’s suddenly warm out! It was just winter last week and now it’s crazy hot and sweaty outside. I think I have seasonal whiplash. I was inside, doors closed, heat on, wearing several sweaters just a few days ago and now it’s shorts weather, I’ve got all the windows open and I’ve even been trying to go out and work on the terrace in the afternoons. The jasmine vines out there are blooming like mad and the smell is intoxicating. A friend told us that there’s a name for this early hot weather, it comes every year and it’s called “El Veranito de San Juan.” It’s like “Indian Summer” but the opposite. After El Veranito de San Juan, there’ll be crazy rain storms on or about August 30th (“Tormentas de Santa Rosa“) and then it’ll get cold again before it becomes spring/summer for real.

Anyway, the beautiful weather is making me feel SO HAPPY and excited about life and a bit manic! I’m also a little stressed with a lot of work, but I took the morning off on Saturday to get chores done and do fun springy stuff. Woke up at 8:00 am!! on a Saturday! and we hopped on our bikes and rode to Chacarita, where we stopped at our new favorite bakery and got some crusty bread plus some amazing almond croissants and pain-au-chocolat. Next stop, El Galpon, where we drank a cup of coffee and a big glass of orange-raspberry juice on the front bench, basking in the warm and glorious sunshine… then headed inside to stock up on farm-fresh veggies, cheese, eggs, smoked ham, etc! Laden down with beautiful produce, we raced back home and dropped off the groceries, picked up the dogs and took them over to the vet for bathing (yes, our vet washes dogs!) … then headed over to Av. Santa Fe to search for some kind of improvised compost container. We’ve been wanting to do composting on our terrace for ever, but we’ve never had a good container. Now that it’s warm out, we’ve bought a few plants and we’re starting to trick out our garden for the coming summer! We settled on a big blue plastic laundry hamper which is kind of ugly but it was the cheapest thing we could think of. I hope it’ll work! Came back home, picked up the soft, clean dogs and spent a few happy hours on the terrace planting stuff! We now have tomatoes, cherry tomatoes, peppers, rosemary, thyme, lavender, cilantro, and some lovely flowers underway in our container garden.

We drank mint iced tea and listened to stories and songs from Townes Van Zandt while planting and digging around in the dirt. Dogs rolled in dirt to get all the “clean” off. Ate some tasty snacks and sandwiches with our plunder from the farmer’s market. Good times.