Luggage when moving abroad

From the things you leave behind like friends, family and stuff, to things we bring and get there: experience, resilience but, also, melancholia, sadness and saudade (look it at google).

Following my previous article about moving abroad, a friend suggested about talking about the “stuff” we bring with us. I ended up by doing a deep analysis around everything we leave behind, that we keep and that we get here. Let’s get into that ship…

I moved to Amsterdam in January/2018 but the history started some months before that. In October 2017, when I got into a website called VanHack by a dear friend’s referral. Thanks Renan. During the selection process I talked a lot with my wife, discussing if I should move on or not. She just got promoted on her job and had a wonderful career in front of her. But, also, she had a kid that she wanted to take care herself.

As soon as I got her yes, I relaid it to the company and we started with the visa. It could take up to two months to get it and, in the meantime, we started looking up how to bring our little friend(dog) Ted (named How I met your mother’s character) to The Netherlands. It was not going to be easy. But first: We need to give our family the “good” news…

Telling your folks can get messy. My father’s first reaction was bad. Really bad. Crazy bad. Like, sanatorium bad. I was taking his newborn and only granddaughter away, far away from him, from her granny and her family. My father in law, an already quiet and reserved guy walked away without saying a word. He was broken: I was taking his two best gals thousands of kilometers away. My mother was silent. The only supportive was my mother-in-law, that saw her “girls” up-scaling their lives and me getting the deserved promotion I was after a long time. This was October, just the beginning.

Bringing your dog abroad is not easy and it is expensive. The whole process takes more than 90 days if you don’t have your dog chipped and vaccinated against rabies correctly beforehand. You need to vaccinate (and chip it, at the same time), have the doctor to record the vaccination on the chip, wait around 90 days, collect a blood sample (serum), send it to analysis and, if everything goes right, you get a certificate saying that your dog is clean. That costed us around a thousand Euros. This was November.

Ted came quiet, sleeping in the cabin (as it is a 1kg/8 year old pinscher) on a comfortable AirFrance dog cage bought at the airport for 120 Euros on the day we traveled. When we got out of the airport, as Schiphol can be quite windy in January, Ted was almost unable to stand. It took some days before it adapted to the windy-coldy Amsterdam.

Birth, Marriage and Other certificates must be apostilled. But they cannot be older than three months. My eight months old daughter needed a new birth certificate even before getting to her first year and, doing that, I’ve found how fragile our record system in Brazil is: It took me some minutes to find that the data on her second birth certificate was wrong: our both names were misspelled, numbers were wrong and a signature was missing. After my complaint they fixed. New certificates in hand, I needed the apostilles and the translations. This was December already.

Sending stuff through mail can be cheaper than luggage. I’ve sent three boxes and two monitors through mail to myself, (after all, it would take a couple of weeks to the boxes to get here, I would have time to travel and get them myself). It costed around a hundred twenty euros everything. It all got here safe. One of the box was filled with old photos.

Time to start saying goodbyes. December is my wife’s birthday and we used that excuse to gather more and more friends. She announced her leave on her dream job and we started barbecuing almost every Friday. Each week a bunch of friends gathered to eat, laugh and drink with us. Every end of night left a sad spot on our hearts — would it be the last time? Also, we started the quest for the suitcases. I had soo many “stuff”: my old G.I. Joes, a bunch of Star Wars memorabilia, a lot of computer parts from my deceased CORE Assistencia (a PC fixing store I owned). A lot of that would end up in the trash.

Two weeks before the trip, it’s time to really move. Sell the car, buy the suitcases, find someone to rent your house, convince your wife to quit your job some weeks early so she can help you put things together. Our parents became a constant presence. Close friends were there almost everyday. Then it’s time to let the tenant take the house. I remember looking dearly to the plastic bags containing papers, toys, things that defined me so far turned into trash. Soo much money spent on trash… I looked one last time for the ceiling I’ve spent thousands of Reais on it, now it’s not my ceiling anymore. We moved to my in-laws.

Vacuuming your luggage makes it better to carry. Our dear maid of honor Liliane introduced us to plastic bags that you can vacuum your clothes in to fit more stuff in the suitcases. Soon I found that space is not a problem. Weight, tough … On the night before our trip, we checked everything, cable for HDs, charger for cellphones, power supply for the electric stuff, passports, power banks (that need to be separated for the security check), notebook, palms, tablets. Time to move.

Make sure to have every document needed as soon as possible. We had an appointment already scheduled at the IND, Dutch Immigration Bureau, for the day after we arrive to get our ID and social security number. You can only have health insurance, work and be someone in The Netherlands if your have an active BSN (the social security number for The Netherlands). I was still due to find a health insurance provider, a definitive house and a couple of other stuff.

Don’t go practicing new sports on the first weeks. On the first weekend we went for a walk around Amsterdam. Amazing. Cold. But Amazing. Look! An ice skating rink! Let’s do it. Broken foot. All paces and ligaments torn on the right foot. Hospital for four hours. Need surgery, but the foot it’s too swelled. Surgery scheduled for the next week. Wait! I don’t have health insurance … The healthcare in The Netherlands works as soon as you get your BSN, even if you don’t have a provider, you just need to choose one, they’ll cover it. That was my bit of luck in this whole tragedy. And Nine pins. And a metal plate.

Take good care of the people you brought. They’re going through something hard also. And they’re alone. They don’t have the work or new stuff you’re getting at the new challenge. Even worse if you’re lying down with your broken foot, not able to feed yourself or go to the bathroom alone. My wife was in a new country, with a newborn kid and a stuck-to-the-couch husband.

New country, new continent: New deceases. The air is full of bacterias, viruses and other protozoa that harm our body. We just get used to them, immune after some time. But, when we move we’re exposed to a brand new environment, a whole new set of diseases and illnesses that we are not immune to it. The most vulnerables go first but, in the end, we’re all going to get ill. A LOT. If you have a broken foot and cannot move, be patient if your wife is throwing up or taking care of a kid with a 40ºC fever. They are the priority now.

Finding a house calls for a local friend. It’s always better to have a local friend help you find a house. After living for two months in “De Pijp” (the best neighbourhood of Amsterdam, in my opinion), we needed to move out as our contract was expiring. Our friend Joris helped my wife visit a couple of houses and he found us our beautiful apartment where we live now. The search took us 45 days. Between vacating, applying for it and moving took us a week. Passport, income statement, employment statement and IDs were the documents needed to apply. As the rental company wanted an expat so it was a perfect match. (And we’re still here after two years...)

Watch out for your family’s sanity. Between the physical recovery, the failure of a crucial project (because I was the one supposed to lead it and I got myself stuck in a couch for months) and a different dynamics between me and my wife, I started having trouble to get out of the bed. Lack of energy, sleeping too much, crying became something common. My wife was facing the reality: She’s a ‘stay at home mom’ and that was new to her. Active, she was used to have control, to be the provider, to earn more than me, to work. Now she felt useless, a leecher.

Seek out counseling, it’s not a shame. Moving is quite traumatic, it’s completely normal to have issues and there’s no shame in asking for help. Acknowledging a problem and finding a solution for it is nothing but human. To find a therapist was quite easy, I must say. I just told our family’s doctor what I was going through and in two weeks she found a therapist able to receive me. Dr Rosa was an expert dealing with PTSD (post traumatic stress disorder) and it worked. Eight sessions (from twelve planed) and I got the control over my mind back. (This is a subject I’ll write someday in the future). The most important part was that I understand that, now, I need to take care of my family.

Families are organisms and, if one pumps blood, the other breathes. The truth is that, in a family, we have different roles and it’s ok if just one “makes money”. It’s not “my” money, it’s ours. After all, if I’m able to work and focus on my job entirely, it’s because I have my wife taking care of me and my kid. And it works well. It is not my money because I KNOW I wouldn’t be able to be the professional I am without her help. My success is more hers than mine. And it’s not because she’s a woman. It’s because she’s a Mother. She wants to be one. And Lily is the one who benefits from it: She has a full time mommy at her side. And if everything fails and we split (I really don’t believe this can happen now but, If she wants to leave, I’ll support, always), nothing more natural than keeping the money flowing to them, after all, she left everything to take care of us.

Nevertheless, our significant others need attention, they’re facing something as big as we and they’re usually alone. Spare some time to talk, to sync the expectations, to share and to HEAR. DO HEAR.

We don’t have control over most of our feelings. Sometimes the best we can do is to acknowledge them and try to understand them. We’re not to blame about what we feel, but how we react to it. Our partners are suffering the same fate as us with a plus of loneliness, sometimes a feeling of emptiness, guilty or uselessness. Talk, share, work it. Don’t get into blaming games, into pointing fingers and pushing each other back. Hear, adapt, learn and, if nothing else works, let it go. But be comprehensive. To expect someone to be perfect is a mistake, we’re all humans. We all have feelings that we cannot control sometimes.

Learn. Language, culture, economy, history. If you're planing to stay, start learning. Super markets, pharmacies, stores everything will be easier when you learn the local language. I'm still struggling to find a tutor to learn. Sometimes is a nightmare go through banks telephone menu, or our physician's phone's menu (always in Dutch and the options are like 3, 7 and 8, Why?). Learning the numbers helped me a lot but I'm still pending on the other stuff. If you're planing to get citizenship, then you need to know even more to be able to claim it.

Build a nest. One of the most difficult task I'm facing now is to find friends. Back in Brazil me and my wife had a group of friend from different origins like University, Board Game Buddies, ex-colleagues, some cousins and sisters that would be with us almost every weekend and here is quite different. People we find are often too different from us, with different values and culture or, sometimes, are just bad people, willing to stab you to get a better chance at work. I've found some people here and there but I know that my wife is struggling with gossip and people that like to talk about other's peoples lives.

Take care of what you get there. I’ve made a lot of friends at DAZN and Tykn, learnt a lot, grew up A LOT but the best “stuff” I got moving abroad was the open channel me and my wife developed after all the troubles we went through. As I’ve said a lot before we got married: To marry is not about being happy, is about being together. Sometimes happy, sometimes not.

To end this already too extensive article, I would say: Enjoy. Don't let the sadness, the nostalgia or tiredness hold you back. Visit places, travel, enjoy the sunrise and sunset. Those things will improve your life, your feeling of emptiness and will help you get through.