#international-relocation

#international-relocation

Between selling our home in Connecticut, finding a place to live in Spain, and figuring out where our sons would enroll in school, I deprioritized my new social life. I assumed we'd naturally meet people once we got here, and we eventually did. But those first few months were lonely. We arrived in August, a month before my sons' school year started, and many locals were still away on summer trips.

That experience was so bad for my mental health that I decided that I couldn't do this forever. I wanted to make more of an impact on people's health in terms of prevention.

She said she stood in her new kitchen, which had radiant floor heating and a view of the fjord, and cried because the bread smelled wrong. She'd moved from São Paulo for a man she'd met at a data science conference. The apartment was beautiful. The healthcare was extraordinary. The man was kind. And the bread smelled wrong, and that wrongness cracked open something in her she hadn't known was load-bearing.

I left London for Australia at 22, not long after my mom died. I'd spent the final year of her life as her full-time caregiver as she battled with cancer. When she was gone, I needed to escape my hometown. I'll never forget my friend seeing me off, excitedly saying, 'You're so lucky to move to Australia!' I forced a smile because I felt the complete opposite. I was literally running away from my grief.

It was Ramadan, and in Zanzibar - outside the tourist area - this meant closed restaurants, shuttered groceries, and recommendations to refrain from even drinking water in public until after dark. The cultural norms, so normal for our hosts and neighbors, were way out of our comfort zone and, unfortunately, our realm of understanding. Still, my family of four made it our mission to connect with our Tanzanian neighbors.

When I first moved to New York in 2017, I drank the Kool-Aid: work hard, play hard. I had just finished university and another journalism internship in Vienna, and flew across the Atlantic with one suitcase and my résumé in hand. It felt like a scene from a movie. For eight years, I lived a Sex and the City lifestyle on a budget: strutting down the streets in high heels, heading to my first corporate job with fire and hope in my heart.

If you’re planning on taking relatively large, bulky items like monitors, desktop computers, stereo equipment, TVs, it’ll be cheaper (and easier) to ship them in advance.