Taking the VERY scenic route

A couple of weeks short of six months since I arrived in Singapore, and now my worldly posessions have joined me. I've managed well enough without my winter clothes, and books I've mostly already read and CDs I have saved to my iPod, but it's still nice to have everything in one place again. As it looks more like my stay here is going to be longer and more stable than I'd hoped, I guess there's poetic justice to having it all finally arrive.

But still, six months? I know it's an awfully long way, but six months?! Really, there was no choice. During the past few moves, I have intentionally kept everything with me regardless of the hoops I have to jump through to get it there, since it's always been unclear where the fates were going to send me next, and how long I would stay there. (The colossal false start that was Luxembourg is the perfect example of this, but it's not the only such example, only the most extreme one.)

But this has led to jumping through a lot of those hoops, and it was only going to get worse. When I first decided to move to France, I went to a great deal of trouble to pack everything neatly back in Denver and rented a minivan to drive it all to the post office...only to discover that I had misread the guidelines and most of my boxes had to be re-packed. I bought the appropriate boxes and did the repacking right then and there, out of the back of the van in the post office parking lot. It took well over two hours and was awfully tedious, although the woman behind the counter complimented me for my patience. ("Most men would have gone off the deep end by now." I was so relieved to be done when she said that that I managed to let it go by - barely.) While decompressing over a well-earned lunch at Red Lobster afterward, I vowed never to put myself in a position like that again.

Only I did. First of all, there were two moves within Denver before I took off for Paris, with everything I still had with me at that point. These were completed by taxi, which ought to earn me a few Palin-points for acting like an ultra-average American on some level or other. Then, when I got to France, all those boxes I'd repacked at the last minute had gotten there safe and sound...but they were delivered to the temporary MBA building at the far end of campus as the real MBA building was being renovated at the time (my colleagues will, by now, have envisioned the long walk back to Expansiel that involved...maybe some of them even saw me lugging those boxes up from the grande ecole).

Never again? Wrong. Luxembourg. That time I rented a truck, which wasn't too bad. Of course, since the whole sojurn in Luxembourg was cursed from start to finish, it's only fair that moving back to Paris couldn't be too easy either. I didn't really make it clear at the time, but the move back to Paris was on extremely short notice. (I wrote that entry immediately after the decision was made, and was too stressed out and depressed to dwell on the whole thing at the time...the fact that I was depressed about moving to Paris shows I wasn't thinking things through very clearly, I suppose!) I found out on Monday morning that I would need to take another class, and by Thursday I was back in the city of lights prepping for class and making appointments to look at rooms.

A week after that, I'd already been back with my rented Citroen to drag most of my stuff back to Paris, but not quite all. I had to come back to close out the apartment anyway, and figured I'd carry the last of my clothes and such in my suitcases. No dice. I overestimated what would fit in the suitcases. Luckily, I had a couple of boxes lying around, so I texted my new roommate for her postal address, ran to the supermarket for packing tape, and just made it to the post office with my two boxes of clothes before a rather nasty rainstorm. The storm meant I was pretty wet for the last train ride back to Paris - all too fitting considering the way things had been going at that point - but I'd conquered the moving beast once again.

Never again? Close enough. I mean, one can't very well mail 20 boxes of CDs, books and clothes from Paris to Singapore on a reasonable budget, especially without an address to send them to. So I broke down and hired professionals, after once again meticulously packing everything...only to be told they could have done that for me. Just as well, I'd rather have them packed so that I knew where everything was.

Not so fast. The moving rep told me he would have to break down all the boxes, take inventory, and re-pack them at the warehouse in London before they got on the boat for Singapore. He also told me not to send any DVDs because anything more risque then your average Disney movie wouldn't get past the censors in Singapore. (I now know he was wrong about that, but my DVDs are at least safe back in America where I sent them instead.) At least my job would end with the boxes being picked up.

I think they told me to expect the trip to take about three months. Not unreasonable, as long as that sounds, but hopelessly optimistic as it turned out. Other observations, now that it finally has arrived, include the fact that they did not really have to repack anything. Everything arrived just as I shipped it, in the same boxes with my handwriting on the sides and no evidence that they'd ever cut the tape on any of them. Which no doubt means I'd have had no trouble getting the DVDs into the country anyway, even if I did have any porn (which I don't!). At least it's here, in any case.

Amusingly, after the trip took months longer than it was supposed to, the delivery company told me to expect them "between 2 and 5" on Monday afternoon. They arrived at 2:15.