Expat Experience Part 4: Firm and Fully Packed
You’ve come so far! You made the considered decision to move overseas. You’ve researched and selected a country, and gotten the visas and paperwork so you can legally reside there. And you’ve been studying Greek or Portuguese, go you! Now you can really get the process in motion. You can plan your move!
When I was a girl this is where we, the family, finally got going. All the stuff in the previous paragraph? The U.S. State Department did that, and my father their employee. What we at home had to do was to decide what not to pack and bring with us.
Because the most important decision is what to leave behind. The wise traveler brings as little as possible. In theory all you need is your electronics and your medications. Everything else you can buy when you get there. In this transnational era, everything you can buy at your grocery store today you can probably buy in any reasonably metro area, worldwide. Do not bring toothpaste, as we had to do when we were travelling to Vientiane, Laos in the 1960s. They have Colgate there now.
Certainly you are not going to bring your furniture and your car. That would involve container shipping, very costly. It would be cheaper to buy a car and a sofa when you get there, wherever it is. So: are you going to sell your old sofa and car? Store it here in the US? Park it with a relative with a big garage? Even if you plan to move to Gdansk and never return, you might want to store some stuff here. (The State Department now sends their diplomats to PODS.) You can ship the sofa overseas later, when you’ve moved into your permanent home and have measured the living room to be sure it’ll fit.
Oh yes — you should think about that. Where are you going to live, when you get to Salerno or Seoul? Even if you have the money and the inclination to buy property, you might want to rent for a year. Find out if you really like living downtown, if you really enjoy being surrounded by grapevines, if a view of the mountains does it for you. This is a wise thing to do whenever you move to someplace new. When you are ready to buy, find a local lawyer/avocat/expert to help you with the paperwork. You want this to be legal and watertight.
Scope out what the rental market is like and what the regs are for a foreigner to sign a lease. This goes for cars as well. It’s surprisingly difficult to lease a car long-term in France. Weirdly, we were forced to rent a car for five months and then return it and rent a different (but identical) car for another several months. I still have no idea why this was necessary.
What about all the stuff you do want to bring? There are businesses that will ship big boxes of clothing to you. If you have an address over in Athens or Bangkok already, you could start doing it. Get prices and weigh your boxes — suddenly you’ll find you want to ship a whole lot less, because this is expensive. You could store the stuff here, and ship it later when you know what you’ll need. If you’re relocating to a tourist spot, you could invite friends and relatives to visit you in Rome, if only they’ll haul a suitcase of your stuff over to you. But in the end it’s more reasonable to acquire nearly everything at your destination.
Is it time to buy the plane tickets yet? No, there’s more stuff to do — next post!