If some day you find out that one of your relatives living abroad decided to surprise you and send you a souvenir don’t rush to feel glad about that.
If you ever find out what your relatives go through in order to send you an envelope you will ask them not to ever send you anything. If you are lucky you must thank God for saving your life even if you refuse the package sent to you. And everything starts this way. One day some one calls you and says that your relative has sent you a package through FedEx. However, FedEx is only responsible for transporting the package to Armenia. In order to receive the pack one must go to the cargo section of the airport to pay the nece4ssary taxes and do the documentations. Of course, you will complain by saying that instead of bringing the package home they call and send you out of town (the highway taking to Zvartnots airport) to receive the package. But all this is nothing compared to your sufferings in the cargo terminal of the airport. Here they tell you that you have to stand in the line for hours for you package (includes for example 6 kilos of baby clothes) next to someone, who receives tons of burden. This will slightly make you nervous but try to save your nerves. Finally comes the expected momentum when you have to receive your stuff from the storage. They ask you, “What’s in there?” Of course you say, “It’s none of your business”. However the asker insists “harshly” that that’s the order. You say that you don’t know because it’s meant to be a surprise. They offer you to call the sender and ask what he/she has sent you. However, as a response to this demand you may say that the package was sent from the US and it’s nighttime over there, no need to disturb the relatives, they might offer you to go to the storage, check the contents of the package, come back and tell the inspector in detail what was in the package. You are one of the few lucky ones, who were allowed to check the contents of the package. After this they will ask you some many questions about the package, which will definitely make you angry and you will ask, “What if I lie to you and give you wrong information about the package, what will you do?” And here goes the most stupid answer, “In the end we are going to check the contents of the package. If you lie to us you will be fined.” It turns out that they are only interested in how honest you are. They also inform you that after you are done with the inspection of the envelope you will have to pay a round sum of money as a tax. They count this tax in the following way. First they estimate the price of the goods with their own taste, then they add the amount of money paid for FedEx on the part of the sender and offer you to pay 20-32% of the total amount. From then on you will have to be in a line for three more days to pay the tax and pay 7000 AMD for each piece of envelope because they tell you that after two days each day of the cargo service (for the package to keep in the storage) costs 7000 AMD. Finally when you decide to refuse from the parcel sent by the relative and go home they inform you that it’s not so easy. You must write a letter to the relevant bodes and inform that you refuse your parcel. Otherwise one day they will call you and tell you to pay for example 4 million USD fro keeping your parcel for so long. The interesting thing is that all this is done based on the law. They will also inform you that only “Hay Post” is authorized to bring your parcels home if they exceed the necessary weight. Evil tongues say that the law has been deliberately adopted this way to create difficulties for citizens.