The kindness of strangers (part 2)

The attentive reader (yes, that's you) might find this picture familiar. That's because it first appeared more than a year ago here, when I wrote at length about how this jacket went missing somewhere between Sydney and Guangzhou, and how it finally turned up again at J's and S's address in Kunming.
I concluded that blog by saying, "Now all I have to do is get my jacket from Kunming to Wellington." It took another year, but the other day it arrived home, accompanied by a cashmere scarf.

S and J were in Kunming when it came to light in Guangzhou, and managed to persuade the airline to send it to them. They didn't like to risk posting it from Guangzhou, though, so they waited until they'd shifted to Shanghai. The jacket went with them.

J asked me whether to send it to my street address or my mail box. I said my mail box, much safer, so he wrote my street address on the package! And S finally sent it in mid-September.

There was no sign of it when I got back from Buenos Aires at the end of November - how long could a sea voyage take?

J gave me the tracking number and just before Christmas I made inquiries at a post office. I was given an Auckland phone number, but in the end it was J who called it, just after Christmas. To be told that the package was now on its way back to Shanghai!

Whoever it was claimed to have got it as far as my front door, but since there was no one home to sign for it, left a card and took it away again. God knows what happened to the card.

By mid-January it was back in Shanghai, anyway. S discovered she couldn't claim it and re-address it without turning up in person with ID, and they were now in Guangzhou. What it took was a helpful friend with photocopies of S's ID, and a post office official willing to bend the rules a little. 

This time it came by air. And arrived within 10 days.

Yes, the gap it left in my wardrobe has long since closed over. But I was still ridiculously glad to see it. And the scarf, chosen for me by S's mother in Urumqui, is lovely. Thank you, everyone.