Customs officers - the scourge of humankind

It all started on Friday last week, when Michael took the morning off to go with me and pick up my stuff from the post office. The trip into nowhere takes at least 45 minutes and brought us to San Martin de Porres, one of the poorer districts located between the airport and the hills.
There we discovered that the passport is not a valid form of ID in Peru, and as Michael had lost his ID card, and his name was the recipient stated on the parcel slip, we could collect nothing. Time and energy wasted: 3 hours.
Since Sunday, we have been working at the Humboldt Current Conference organised by IMARPE and IRD in Lima. It's great, but I don't understand most of the physics, wind forcing, current and anchoveta models and what not. This afternoon we took time off and went to the post office with a tiny piece of paper which states that Michael has indeed lost his ID card (by the way it turned up when we went to do our laundry at the launderette on Saturday, but that was too late to cancel the process of getting a new one).
Lesson 2 at the post office: used items of clothing or shoes may not be brought into the country, unless received by a person returning from a journey abroad. This is to prevent people from importing second hand clothes and compete with local production (!). Since my name does not appear as a recipient, and since Michael has not been out of the country for the last year, we couldn't collect anything. Instead we have to organise a "rectification" of the recipient's name and address, which means sending a form in Spanish to my dad who has to fax/e-mail it back signed together with xxxx copies of his passport AND his "sent" receipts. We also need to submit at least 2 bills from the address to which the parcels were sent...
I just phoned my dad, he is in Hungary and the receipts are most probably in his car, which is -wait for it - in Copenhagen Airport's car park (admittedly a very safe place indeed to store them).
If we have the papers here sorted by the 30/11 it's only going to cost me 70 soles per parcel (=€17). If we don't manage that, it will cost 239 soles (€56) per parcel!!!
The final thing that really made me want to go berserk, is that the customs officer who opened the parcel and talked to me and Michael was lovely, and wanted to give them to me and be done with the whole drama - as a sensible person, he realized that I wasn't going to sell my dirty rugby boots or half-used makeup to anyone to make a profit. Only, because my dad had declared the content as shoes, he needed the approval of his superior. We spoke to that guy at our last visit too, and his only answer to any question is "así es la ley" - it's the law. Come flood or earthquake. Given all this, we'll probably end up returning the parcels to Ängelholm, and I'll have one pair of dress shoes for the next four months... (big crisis, on the wider scale of things, obviously, especially what with world famine and all).
I was so angry on the bus back from the post office that I was almost hoping someone would grab me or try to steal something from me, just so I'd have an excuse to slap someone and shout at them.
The only ray of sunshine today was when Arnauld, Michael's future PhD supervisor, and representative of IRD in Lima told us we can go to the conference Peña party on Thursday as a reward for helping out at the conference.

My company in Bremen sent me a translation order today. Unfortunately the translation was to go into Norwegian....! They apologized five minutes later.
Así es la vida.