Drums Say Bye Bye

I don't know what it was, but definitely the freaks were out in force on another leisurely Wednesday night station beers.

I was first accosted by what was probably the most busted sumo girl in Japan.

I thought she wanted to ask directions or something. She asked, "What is your country?" The first thing that popped into my head was "America". They all think we're American, so I thought nothing to perpetuate the stereotype. In hindsight I should've said, "Japan". Now THAT would have done her head in!

While I was sipping down a pretty bad, kiwifruit chu-hi (hey, it was on sale), there were a few other near miss Japanese "objects" coming our way.

As one woman approached, the other guys moved to the side leaving their bags unattended. She went right up to their stuff. I thought she was going to do a runner. I had my mouth safely buried in an anpan.

All i can say is it must have been a full moon.

The good thing about Wednesdays is I pretty much drunkenly fall asleep straight away. The not-so-good thing is that my day is at least half over before I wake up.

Last Thursday I attempted to post the electric drum kit back to Australia. I can't set the whole kit up, and it's taking a lot of space up in the apartment.

This time I was going to do it via International Parcel Post (or "by ship" as you might say). The general idea was that I didn't really need it in a hurry back home and it's a whole lot cheaper than EMS (Express Mail Service).

The English Japan Post pages are reasonably easy to understand, but you have to look around pretty hard to get the details you have to understand, like size and weight limits as it pertains to your country.

For the International parcel post I looked here.

The picture shows the "formula" for size. According to this (Japanese only), Australia is B. That means maximum length is 1.05m, and the length PLUS the CIRCUMFERENCE must not be more than 2m. Furthermore, for Australia the maximum weight allowed in is 20kg.

Still with me?

With EMS the sizes are a whole lot more flexible. According to this on another far away page you can send a 1.5m long package, with a combined length and circumference up to 3m! Still only 20kg though.

Anyways, the two boxes I had neatly packed were both too heavy, and too big for Surface Mail. It was a pain getting the boxes to the post office, and I just didn't have time to unpack and repack. By this time my morale was pretty low too.

It was going to have to be another day.

So, fast forward one week, and I tried it all again. The problem was the drum rack. The poles were quite long, and the only way I could do this was to make a custom box out of the plentiful cardboard I have in the room. Wonderful!

Even with the best I tried, I STILL couldn't make it fit the restrictive dimensions. I gave up and sent it EMS. The other two boxes I decided to do the same. I even threw in the Tickle Me Elmo as I don't use it anywhere near as much either.

It cost a LOT to send three boxes of almost 20kg each. The last was 150g over, so I had to remove one item from the lesser box to let me send them. Although I'm a little sad to see it go (for now), it's a relief I finally got it able to be sent.

What this has taught me is not to buy any more drums, or other big and heavy stuff. More guitars? Hmm.. I got to send two more of those back home sometime.. :'(