I learned the hard way that I couldn't just ship a laptop to myself from the USA to Mexico. I had a nice, new-ish Macbook Pro that I wanted to use sitting in the USA, and the laptop I was using in Mexico was getting old. What I should have done was just fly to the USA to get the nice laptop and then hand carry it back. What I did instead was ship the laptop via Fedex to my address in Mexico. Big mistake.

Fedex informed me that my laptop was stuck in customs. This wasn't a pay-a-fee-and-get-your-stuff kind of stuck. I couldn't pay any amount of money to get the laptop out. I had to find a local import partner which could take weeks or months to do just to get this stupid computer out of customs. And that's assuming they didn't destroy the laptop before I could claim it. There was literally no way for me to just pay some big ol' tax to get the computer.

Eventually I asked if I could have the laptop shipped back to the USA, and they were happy to do this. So I shipped the laptop from the USA to Mexico, from Mexico to a friend's place, and then I bought my frienbd a roundtrip ticket to Mexico to enjoy a vacation on the condition that he brought my damn computer with him.