Online shopping

Online shopping in China is big business. At sites like taobao.com and 360buy.com you can buy almost anything online. However, those sites don't except foreign credit cards or PayPal, so shopping there is almost impossible for non-Chinese, even if you can read the website. While living in Nanning I ordered some books at amazon.cn, which was as easy as back home. Now I used the same website to buy a new phone, and that was a bit more complicated.
The books I ordered through amazon.cn were prepaid with my VISA credit card, but since my bank cancelled my card for a stupid reason, I could not use it anymore. Luckily, amazon also offers a COD payment option, so I could just order the phone, and they ship it without any payment. You pay the delivery man once the product arrives at your doorstep. Convenient, except... you never know when it arrives.
After ordering my phone (which is the cheapest Android 2.2 smartphone I could find, at 699 RMB), I received a confirmation email with a scheduled delivery date of July 29th, which was just one day after ordering. Fast!
However, nothing arrived on July 29th.
Like most online retailers, Amazon uses an external courier service for deliveries, in this case Feiyuan, which provides a tracking service on their website. The tracking info told me in detail where my package had been (originating in Fuzhou, it had traveled to Xiamen, and was in the hands of a delivery man named Lin Kai Ming since July 29th). I expected mr. Lin at my door any minute now, or at least a call or email to notify me of the imminent arrival of my order. Because there was no such notification, I asked Xiao An to call the info hotline mentioned in my order confirmation email. She got the reply that the delivery company was very busy, but my package would arrive soon, probably by the next day. The next day nothing happened, and also on Sunday no news. In China weekends don't exist, so that was no excuse.
This morning Xiao An left. I brought her to the bus station and after that returned home quickly to await the arrival of my new phone. At about 3 in the afternoon I got a call, but I did not understand what the pretty voice on the other side was saying, except that is was about my order. I asked her to call me back in 5 minutes and rushed out to the hostel across the street where the helpful staff would surely help me, and they did.
One of the boys answered the call (she did indeed call again, so my Chinese isn't half that bad) and it turned out it was Amazon inquiring if my phone had arrived. It had not.
My friend asked for another phone number of the courier company, and got 4. However, all of them responded with a prerecorded message asking you to hold on, while playing annoying music. Then he got really resourceful and used Baidu (Google's big brother in China) to find the number of the delivery man himself. He found the number of a colleague of our delivery man on a forum where people were complaining about Feiyuan, and called him. The colleague was so friendly to give the mobile number of our man (remember, we had his name), and seconds later we were on the phone with the man who had my phone in his possesion. He was indeed very busy making deliveries, and did not have my package in his car (or rather: electric bicycle, as I later found out), but he suggested a simple solution: I could pick up the parcel myself! He would meet me at the bus stop at Xiada University this evening.
So, this was how I got my phone. I had to go pick it up at night by meeting a stranger at a bus stop, handing him the cash, and collect the merchandise. It was almost like a drug deal. After I waited for half an hour at the said bus stop, he found me, still wearing his uniform. All information on the package label seemed alright, so I handed him the money upon which he produced a pocket knife to slice open the box. Everything seemed in order, the invoice and receipt of payment in the box, so I happily took my new phone home. More on that later, once I figure it out.