9-1

“9 -1-1 is a joke in your town” is a little shout out to those of you who appreciate some good old fashioned late 80’s militant rap which in this case may have also come complete with a giant clock.  What may also be a joke starting with “9-1” is the month of September, as in how can it possibly be September 1?  Been awhile since we contributed to the interwebs, kept meaning to for about the last 6 weeks, but what can I say, it’s been busy!

So what have we been up to? Um, well, more than just a nice little Saturday so to speak.  As most people by now know, at the beginning of July (yeah, like 2 months ago, I know) we left the friendly confines of Zurich, Switzerland and made the move to the big city of Paris.  As has been documented on this blog we loved our time in Switzerland but were faced with the choice to either come home to SF or move to Paris.  It wasn’t a difficult choice.

Having obtained the necessary paperwork, off we went and thus begins our past two months.  Start with the arrival at a new city / temporary apartment.  Nothing to really note regarding the temporary apartment, wasn’t bad by any means but not too exciting either, other than some creative engineering on the appliances (see stove from previous blog).

Finding this place to be nothing more than ok and obviously temporary, we then had our day of apartment searching with a person we worked with directly to get us set up.  A full day of looking at 8 different places and naturally the first one of the day was the one we liked the best.  We still could not move in for a few more weeks but at least got a place secured and could check that off the long list of things to do after a few rounds of back and forth with the property agent and owner, took some time but we got it done

Next up – Bank account.  This should be easy, open account, deposit money, get ATM cards, on line set up, and off you go.  Not so fast mon ami.  They make this process much more difficult than it needs to be by forcing you to come into the bank twice and receive codes via mail that may never arrive.  So this took about 4 weeks to do what should taken about 4 minutes.  But we’re set up, so moving on.

Work – since neither of us had any changes to our jobs, just simply working in a different office, this one was pretty straight forward.  Well except for me and the visa / transfer process.  I would tell you more but honestly, it was so painful I just can’t relive it.  Maybe sometime later on over a beer or two I can fill you in, but for now let’s just say we’re both settled in at our new offices and work is going along just fine now that we’re here.

Moving day – relatively painless getting into our new place on August 1, took all of our suitcases, got the keys, had the rest of our stuff from Zurich delivered and we’re in.  Still took a few weeks to get settled in, buy all the little things you always need when moving into a new place and finally as of about a week ago, starting to feel like home.

About a week after moving in we needed to take a week and go back to San Francisco and get our life there in order, meaning packing up our apartment and moving all our stuff into storage in SF.  This week in SF was great, very good to be home, but a very busy few days of packing, moving, property manager meeting and taking care of all that we could to keep things organized.  Our apartment in SF is now being rented by someone – so for those of you who stayed there the past year without us knowing because you got a key from somebody else – don’t go back.  Somebody else lives there now.  You have been warned.

Week in SF, make the trip back to Paris, back to work, work trip that week in late August blah blah blah and that friend is how two months goes by and we get to 9-1 without even realizing it. 

So one last question – when does summer vacation start?  Doh!