During my last visit back to the States, I finally managed to go through some of the family china that my mom has been keeping for me in her cupboard. There's a full dinner set of my great-grandmother's that I have always loved. The problem, of course, is moving a full dinner set of antique china from Arizona to New Zealand. It's fragile, and it's surprisingly heavy -- they don't make things like this anymore! A full dinner plate weighs almost one pound! In the end, I just sorted through this dinner set, made an inventory of what's there, and wrote a list of the pieces I'd like to claim as mine. Then I put it all back in the cupboard. Getting it all over here seemed like an insurmountable task at the moment. I'll get there though, I do have a bit of a plan now. It involves packaging and mailing some and hand-carrying some on my next trip.
For now, however, I did bring a different set of plates back. These ones are a gorgeous pattern called Singapore Bird. They were a wedding gift to my mom and dad, a gift from my grandmother's friends. It's not a full dinner set but more like a dessert set. There's medium sized plates and tea cups and saucers. I brought the plates... and one tea cup. The weight of just that was more than the allowable weight of a carry-on on Air New Zealand.
