Arrival in Geneva

Wednesday, June 23 2010 


We made it safe and sound. As always, the flight was long (15 hours) and jet lag can be quite the opponent, but it's great to finally get over here after all the anticipation of the last few months.

Since we are still homeless (permanent home that is), we were placed into corporate housing. It's better than we had expected (pictures below). Within a few hours of getting here, our temp apartment already had the "lived-in" look. :)

These are our views from the apartment windows. Lots of apartment buildings in the neighborhood we're currently in. As you can see, the weather is really nice-- skies are clear, sun is out and it's actually quite warm (highs of 29 C / 84 F).

We've spent the first few days running errands and pretending like we know French when speaking to the cashiers. FYI, it doesn't work at all-- but it will come with time, we hope. We bought our first 240v appliances (hair dryer, iron, etc.) so I guess that means we are official.

In addition to the relocation company searching for housing options for us, we've also been searching any website we can for additional options. We think we were somewhat spoiled when we came on our house hunting trip in May and looked at 9 units in just 2 days. Unfortunately, we didn't get the unit we applied for. And after hearing stories from some of our co-workers who arrived a month ago and are still searching for housing, we fear that we have our work cut out for us.

Apparently Geneva is going through a record-high housing shortage as demonstrated in the photo to the left. This was a group viewing that we went on in May (there were twice as many people waiting than you can see in that picture). It's not unusual to be up against 30-80 people applying for the same unit. How they chose which renters are selected, we're still not sure. But hope to have good news on this front in the near future...

Packing Up Our Lives

The initial stages of our move...

Our lease was up on April 30 in our Sammamish condo (mom & dad Visser graciously took us in for our final 2 months in the US) so we had to move all of our stuff to a storage unit. It's hard to believe that all of our household possessions could fit into such a small space (18x20), but through the help of Dave's mom and dad (creative stacking) we were able to get everything in (even the professional movers were impressed when they saw our handy work).

The movers came at the end of May to pack up all of our things to either "storage" or "surface" (Geneva). If you picture a line cutting down the center of the picture, most of the items on the left we stored and most on the right is en route to Geneva. It's an interesting process if you've never seen professional movers at work. They literally wrap everything in paper (in the picture of the moving truck below, if you look at where the yellow strap makes a "v", that object wrapped in paper is Ang's bike). We felt a little bad watching the movers work so hard and not being able to help much. One of them shared a story about trying to pack up a lady's house and she hovered over them with a butcher knife the entire time. So I guess that made us feel better about the situation.

After 7 movers worked a 10 hour day, everything was out of the unit, overly wrapped and on it's way. Our shipment should arrive in Geneva the first week of August.

Welcome to our blog!

Hi everyone-- welcome to our blog, 'SwissViss'.  We are new to the world of blogging, so bear with us through the growing pains.  Hopefully by the end of our 2-year adventure, we will be pros, right?

Our goal with the blog will be to share our many experiences here in Geneva and the rest of Europe, while they are still fresh in our minds.  Because of the time zone difference, we know we won't be able to chat with our friends and family as often or long as we'd like, so hopefully this blog can fill in the gaps and keep everyone up to date on our whereabouts and activities.  Moreover, we figure this would be a fantastic way to log our experiences for our own memories' sake.

Because this is the first post, we will give everyone a little refresher on why we are in Geneva:

As most of you know, we both work for Expedia and the company has just opened a new office in Geneva to focus on strengthening our hotel / lodging presence in Europe.  Dave was asked to fill a Project Manager role that will be based here.  Realizing the two of us are sort of a "package deal", Expedia offered to transfer Ang's job, too.  Both of our Directors will be based in Geneva as well, so everything fell into place in an unexpected way.  Also, from a personal perspective, we have tossed around the idea of living overseas for a short period of time before our life gets re-prioritized with kids.

The whole idea is a bit crazy (!), but we are excited to take on the adventure.  We have embarked on a new way of living, new surrounding and a new culture-- and are trying desperately to learn a bit of French.

Many of you know that the two of us share a passion for travel.  In our first 3 years of marriage (we'll be celebrating our 3rd anniversary this week!), we have had our fair share of travel adventures and feel very blessed to have had those opportunities.  Here's to a new chapter of travels over the next couple of years!

Love,
Dave & Ang