The Adventure of a Simple Move

Unfortunately, the reality of our busy schedule is playing catch-up with our efforts to maintain a blog.  So here are a few posts to get caught up…

Our last weekend in Geneva (prior to being back in the States for 11 days) was quite the interesting experience.  We found out Friday afternoon that we needed to move all of our belongings out of temp housing prior to flying out Monday morning.  This posed a slight challenge because of two reasons:  1) We had already received our air shipment from home (which contained several boxes, about 400 pounds worth of household items) plus we had 5 suitcases from the flight over.  2) Because we were leaving on Monday, there was no time to set up an easy storage solution.  Our good friend Jaime offered his home for storage space— which was awesome.  The only problem?  We needed to find a way to move all of our stuff a few miles away.

What turned out to be our first major reality check in a new culture, we attempted a small move…

It’s Saturday morning and our first thought was to rent a car.  Sounds fairly easy, right?  We learned of a website, mobility.ch, that offers inexpensive car rentals for short periods of time.  We wanted to book a larger vehicle so we only needed to make one trip out to Jaime’s.  Although we didn’t immediately recognize this as a problem, the earliest time a large vehicle was available that day was 7pm.

Little did we know, we needed a Mobility card (basically a membership card) to pick up a reserved Mobility car.  Apparently we needed to pick up the card at an office in the Geneva train station, about 30 minutes away from our temp housing (the ridiculous part is that we had already been at the train station earlier in the day for an unrelated reason).  Online, the office hours said it closed at 9pm.  We arrived at the station at 5:30pm only to discover the office actually closes at 5:15 and isn’t open on Sundays. 

So we have a car reserved for 7pm, which we can’t actually pick up.  We race home to cancel the reservation only to learn the joys of dialing a Swiss phone number.  After four (unsuccessful) different number combination attempts on Dave’s U.S. cell phone and a few tries from the landline in our apartment (which apparently needed to be preloaded with cash) we remembered the miracle known as “Skype”!  With a few minutes to spare we were able to cancel the reservation and were happy to get at least half of our money back.

Plan B.  It’s now around 7pm and we need to get moving.  On Friday Dave had joked about taking multiple trips on the bus out to Jaime’s place.  It’s funny how jokes become reality when options are limited.  After five bus trips over the course of several hours and loads of sweat, all of our stuff was moved (stuff shown on right).  Jaime graciously offered to help us out which saved us an extra trip or two.  We’re pretty sure we each lost about five lbs during the “five loads workout”.  We are going to attempt the Mobility car rental again to get the stuff to our own apartment this week (we’re content with not losing five more pounds).