The Container Arrives!!

It is now Tuesday, and we’ve taken the evening off from opening boxes and sorting things.  By this I mean that Finnur fell asleep with Bjarki at 7 pm, and I stayed up to mind Anna who didn’t succumb to sleep until somewhere between 9 and 10pm.  It’s now 10:30 pm, and it’s getting dark enough outside (halfway-dark-ish) that I should turn on the inside lights.  But first, a ‘little’ (ok, very long!)  blog-post about the arrival of our container this past Friday, which was of course preceded with a bit of drama.  Queue the drums!

The container arrived in Iceland on Monday, the 2nd of August, which is a public holiday.  On Tuesday, Finnur and the husband from the other family that had stuff in the container go and submit all the customs paperwork to the shipping company, Eimskip.  They tell us it usually takes 1-3 days to clear the paperwork through customs, but might take longer because of summer vacations/summer replacement workers.

So we wait.  On Thursday the other family meet a good friend of ours from CA who tell them to call customs and ask how things are going, which they do.  Turns out there’s something wrong with the paperwork from Eimskip, and has been for some time.  The husband spends a good amount of time calling customs and then Eimskip before getting Eimskip to find their error.  But as Eimskip is about to send in the corrected paperwork, the electronic system that links the two goes down.  Big time.  As a lark the husband calls customs and asks them about the status of our paperwork, and is told that we aren’t even in their system.  He reports this whole saga to us on Thursday evening.

Around 10 am on Friday I therefore sit myself down in front of the telephone and start calling around.  Customs notifies us that we now exist in the system (form 1 of 2 had arrived at 9 am) but since there was still stuff missing (i.e. the actual customs report) we hadn’t even been entered the processing line.  A call to Eimskip confirmed that the electronic communications system was still down, but being worked on.  They ask me to call customs later in the day, so I go to work resigned to the fact that we’d most likely be getting the container on Monday or Tuesday (and thereby ruin all of next week work-wise).

At 1:30 pm I call customs and the lady that answers happens to have my paperwork sitting in front of her, and is entering it into the system!  It turns out that since we hadn’t entered the customs processing line, customs was ok with receiving our report in paper form, which one of the ladies at Eimskip had kindly hand-delivered to them (along with others’ forms, I’m assuming).  The customs lady tells me to call again in an hour to check on the status of our case.  She also tells me that the forms from the other family have to go through the still-malfunctioning electronic system since they were further along in the process.  And of course the shipping company can’t release the container until both families have cleared customs.  Fun!

At 2:30 pm I call customs again, and am told I can come and pick the container release notice up from them!!  I’m also told that the release notice for the other family will be ready ‘soon’.  So I make my way downtown in the rain, and pick up my form shortly before 3 pm.  While I’m there, the husband from the other family shows up to pick up his form, and I regret not bringing the customs people flowers.  I call Finnur to tell him the good news, and tell him to call people to come and carry stuff (oh, and clear floor space in the apartment, and pick up the kids before 4pm, and…).  Did I mention that the customs office closes for business at  3:30 pm?

We arrive at the shipping company around 3:20 pm, and stand around for a good while while they prepare the bills for handling the container, and driving it to our home.  At 3:50 pm we have paid in full, and are told the container will be driven out shortly!  Did I mention that the shipping company had to be paid in full by 4 pm for a same day delivery?  Talk about ‘in the nick of time’!!!

So I drive home, and slowly but surely a small army arrives at our place.  As it happened Finnur got a hold of enough people that we ended up not calling people that were probably expecting a call, but no fear – we’ll call you next time!

And so we waited and waited and waited and waited, until at 5 pm the container was driven up the street and unloaded right next to our apartment building (at 40 feet it was wider than the side of the building!).  I must admit I found it absolutely surreal that this huge lump of metal that I had last seen on a warm day in California was all of a sudden in front of me.  Then the madness started, with furniture and boxes being carried out and up almost non-stop for an hour and a half, with me directing traffic, which was tricky because the furniture was all packed in brown paper so there was a lot of guessing!

When it was all done, we were left with a wet mountain of paper (this was the first rainy day for days!), and a very full apartment in utter disarray.  We did manage to feed our helpers pizza, hug and say goodbye to everybody, and then clear enough floor space for a mattress in Anna’s room for the kids.  Later that night we put our bed together, and it was extra nice to finally sleep in a proper bed, and not just a mattress on the floor.  (The other family rented a delivery van and arrived shortly after we’d finished to empty their stuff out).

Saturday was spent putting together bed-frames and arranging furniture, and Sunday saw more furniture arranging, unpacking, and fastening shelves to walls since this is after all earthquake country.  By the end of Sunday the couches were clear of stuff, and our dining table was the last piece of furniture to be unwrapped and installed.  We were supremely fortunate in that Adda and Halli adopted Anna and Bjarki for most of the weekend, and Finnur’s parents helped us out as well on Saturday.

And that is the end of the container-saga.  It left us on June 10th, and was supposed to be loaded onto a ship on June 14th.  Instead it got delayed in California until June 17th because the ship needed some repairs, and therefore arrived so late to Hamburg that the next available ship to Iceland was full.  The container then spent a week hanging out in Hamborg before meandering to Iceland over the span of a week.  It was unloaded in Iceland on August 2nd, and we got it delivered on August 6th, a mere four days before the two month mark.  Total time was 8 weeks, which is considerably more than the 4-6 weeks we were told initially.  But we got our stuff in the end, so YAY!!! 🙂