leaving-uk

The end of my first week

Mar 082008
 

Well a week has gone by and we are settled in and things seem to be good so far. The weather has not been too good quite cold and a lot of rain (but I don’t mind that as I get to wond them up about terrible German weather!).

Staying at Nicole’s parents is quite an easy life – Hanne (Nicole’s mum) pretty much does everything here – the washing, ironing and cooking and that has suited us quite well.

Currently Nicole is lying asleep on the sofa withher sister Sandra on the other sofa – they were both out until 5am drinking with another sister Silke. I decided to have an easier night and leave the sisters to it  – which I cam glad of as they seem to have had a good night and Nicole could have a night off translating for me which I think much be a relief.

We are off to Cologne a bit later on to she the new place that Sandra lives and will stay there tonight and go to see FC Cologne play football tomorrow. I will be interested to see how it is when beer is allowed in the stadium – unlike in the UK for football, but I don’t expect it to be very different to UK Rugby matches.

We must also go this afternoon to help Nicole’s other sister Kerstin built the new nursery for their new child that is due in June.

That is life – stress free, nice working environment, and hardly anything to worry about when not working – I think I will only cope with so much relaxing  – but I will enjoy it while it lasts – I think in Spain it will be much more stressful.

Setting the scene here – the food

Mar 022008
 

OK – so we are getting settled – when the weather is better I will take some pictures of the house, the village and the valley.

Talking of the weather – whenever I visit here, someone normally mentions the bad weather in the UK, which always winds me up as in my mind it is a stereotype and not based on any facts (but when has that ever stopped me!). Well it has been highly enjoyable that it has rained for two days here whilst there is sunshine in the UK. The other popular wind up is about the European Football Chamionship this summer – they are often keen to ask me who I think will win – and then wait with a smile knowing that I can’t say England as they are already out – hilarious!!! :-D

Lentil Soup with Sausage and BreadSo in absence of any photos of Serrig – I though I would help promote the stereotype that all they eat here is sausages and bread – our meal yesterday was Lentil soup with fresh bread and a Mettwurst.

A Mettwurst is not so much a sausage but a carefully built booby trap for the unsuspecting – with pockets of exploding hot oil built into the sides.

Meal was great though and I can see that 2 months here will be a pleasure – the big meal of the day is at lunchtime normally rather than the evening – but that is the only difference really.

Phase 1 is complete – we have left the UK

Mar 012008
 

Yesterday we left the house, Milton Keynes and England – and after a 11 hour journey we arrived in Serrig, Germany – the village Nicole grew up in.

The big green monster and Rudi’s trailerWe loaded everything we own – yes everything into our lovely green van (The Big Green Monster) and left. Luckily we got some help from Jon, Vicki, Ruby and Gary which meant we only left 40 minutes later than we had planned at 9:40.

Apart from a strike by the French crew of the SeaFrance ferry – the journey was great and we got to Serrig at 9:30 yesterday evening. We unloaded the van, had a celebratory beer with Nicole’s parents and then showered and headed out to a 44th birthday party. The party was something that Nicole really wanted to attend as yesterday was the 29th Feb and the poor guy whose birthday it was only gets to celebrate it every 4 years (this is his 11th birthday party!).
Nicole, Vicki, Nicole and Al

Anyway today has been spent sorting out boxes and setting up our German office of Luzia Research – all gone well.

I’lll get some pictures up soon.

Decluttering our lives

Jan 142008
 

One of our aims in moving to Valencia is that we are much more flexible in being able to move the next time we want to move. We have managed to amass so much stuff so far in our lives and we want to get rid of a load of the clutter and just be able to fit our lives into a set of cardboard boxes – load up the van and move on.

In total time it will probably take about 8 weeks for us to have sorted though all of our stuff in the UK and box it up, redecorate our house and buy a van to travel in. When we are in Valencia we would love to just be able to decide to move onto somewhere else and know that all we have to do is hand our notice on a flat in and then pack up and move on!

We started the process of decluttering our lives this weekend by sorting out the loft. The loft has just had stuff added to it since I moved into the house in 2002 and then when I went away in 2003 I moved everything up there and only took out the stuff I really needed when I came back in 2004. In 2004 we also added a load of stuff from Nicole’s parents house and in 2006 my mum gave me a load of stuff that had been sitting up in her loft.

So this weekend was spent going through all of this and categorising this as either going with us, going up into my mum’s new loft, going to a charity shop or going to the tip. This took a very long time and has made our house a complete tip. Luckily at lunchtime today we got rid of the last of the stuff for charity shops (4 different charity shop visits with a full car!). We have visited the tip three times with a full car and tonight we will drive over to my mum’s and load up her loft with all the stuff we just couldn’t chuck out!

The spare room at the moment is our store room for the stuff we want to take with us – it just feels great to be able to look in there and see how little stuff we have got our lives down to .

I think over the next 6 weeks we will probably decide to get rid of some more stuff especially as we cope with the reality of the size of the van we are getting and realise we are going to have to take even less than we thought.

First impressions of Valencia / Spain

Dec 232007
 

So we arrived two days ago and I guess it worth talking about my first impressions of this part of Spain.

First of all the airport – we landed through cloud and fog and then they had to park the plane for a few minutes. The pilot announced that unfortunately there was still a plane in our space so we would have to wait until it was moved somewhere else. After 10 minutes or so we were taken to our slot then we had to stand there for 10 minutes whilst they brought the landing stage over and connected it to the plane – much confusion with the cabin crew and the ground crew.

Once the landing stage was brought over we disembarked from the plane and were then directed to use the steps down the side of the landing stage to get to the tarmac – not use the nice corridor into the arrivals area of the airport – there was a woman there frantically talking on her walky-talky – who seemed quite surprised that a plane had landed at the airport. We wandered across the tarmac to a backdoor of the airport and then went through passport control.

This all lead to me feeling that life in Spain may not be quite as organised as the UK and that there were somethings I would need to get used to. Writing this though has made me realise that we probably had to enter through the backdoor as we needed to go through passport control because the UK is not in the Schengen Agreement. The surprised lady and the plane in our space could have been related and I know that planes go to the wrong places at Stansted so on reflection my initial feelings were probably a little harsh.

We got picked up at the airport by the woman we are renting the apartment from, she is German and so apart from the small talk Nicole had to do all the talking with her. As soon as we left the car park (and for the next 30 minutes) it became clear that complaining about traffic in the UK would fall on deaf ears to anyone who regularly visits Valencia airport – chaos! Not only were there just queues on all of the roads – frustrated and impatient drivers zoomed up the inside lane to push in ahead – which was making the queues much worse! I asked when was a good time to fly into the airport of Helga (our landlady) and she said it doesn’t make a difference what time – even 2am there are problems!

So my first impressions of Spain / Valencia are disorganised and chaotic – the first may be harsh but the second so far seems fair comment.

So the news is out – we are leaving the UK!

Dec 212007
 

We have been talking about it for a while and now we have decided to just do it!

The excitement and the speculation that lasted for months earlier this year about whether we might get an opportunity to go to Stuttgart with Nicole’s work and then disappointment of the eventual bad news that the deal never got signed left it’s mark on us both. One conclusion we had once we had the bad news was that if we were to leave the country it would be better if it was a decision that we had made and were in control of than if it was in someone else’s hands.

So back at the start of November we had a chat about our future options and decided that we would like to leave the country and do it based on our own decision. We decided that we would take some risks and just leave, try to make money from the various on-line work I am doing and just see what happens. In the worst case we decided we would end up back in Milton Keynes again.

So here I am only 7 weeks later – Nicole has resigned from her job, and we are in Valencia, Spain on phase 1 of our project looking to see if this is the place for us.

There are so many things to comment on at the moment – but I will leave my reflections on Spain for the moment and mention a little more about our plans.

Nicole’s notice period was 3 months – so this means that she will finish working for her current company on the 19th February 2008, and our aim is to leave the UK on the 1st of March to then spend 2 months in Nicole’s village in Germany (Serrig). After that we are going to move on to warmer places and Valencia at the moment is the place we plan to head for.

Between now and March we have a lot to do – fix up the house for renting out, rent it out, buy a new vehicle, sort out all sorts of legal and tax issues and throw out loads of the junk we have accumulated over the years. It is our aim to get the essentials bits and pieces of our lives down to a small enough amount that we can fit it all into a van / people carrier (possibly with a trailer) and then if we don’t like Valencia, we can try Barcelona, if we don’t like Barcelona try Madrid etc – without it being too much hassle.

That’s the plan though …. but stay tuned to find out what might actually happen – more news as it comes

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