I guess it had to happen sometime. Yesterday on my way to pick The Bun up from school, I met the neighbour who lives below us in the elevator. She smiled at me and Bao, asked if I spoke French, and then stated the obvious - 'I live below you.' Immediately I replied, 'is everything okay?' and she told me that it would be nice if we tried to stop ( Read more... )

Today marks our second month since our Big Move. Just two months, but somehow it feels like we have already done so much or like we have been here longer. There's a little bit of my head that refuses to acknowledge that we won't be back home in Singapore for a long, long time, but I try not to think about it too much because what good can ( Read more... )

I'm kind of waiting for the other shoe to drop where my current domestic streak is concerned, because I feel a little like I'm pretend playing house and cooking up fantasy food, except the apartment is real and the food is actually edible. It's been less than two weeks of putting three meals on the table a day and I've surprised myself by remaining ( Read more... )

The Swisscom technicians did turn up! Albeit at the rather early hour of 8.30am - so I probably misheard 'dix' instead of 'huit' for the timing, but oh well, at least they did call ten minutes before they arrived so we had some time to finish breakfast. After almost two hours of fiddling with wires and two cups of Singapore-style 'kopi' (premixed ( Read more... )

Five days since the Big Move, and we're slowly but surely finding our feet. It's the little details that really slow us down and use up a lot of mental energy, like deciphering the washing machine settings which are in German and French, doing laundry by trial and error, discussing curtains and curtain hooks in broken French to a salesperson, and ( Read more... )

There was absolutely no time for me to write any semblance of a post before we left late on Tuesday night. In fact, right after my sister's wedding last Friday J and I packed frantically into the wee hours of the morning and basically did not stop until the taxi came to take us all to the airport. So much for my plans to enjoy our last day in ( Read more... )

Good news from J, just as The Bun and I left Geneva: our application for Apartment 1 was approved! Now for the rest of the paperwork (reviewing the lease - in French - and signing it), getting some minor repairs done, paying for the furniture and working out delivery dates, so on and so forth. Moving is really exhausting. Some people change ( Read more... )

Our apartment hunt has been a source of stress ever since we arrived. Everyone had warned us about it - that it would be exhausting, that we would need to jump through bureaucratic hoops, that even if we found a place we liked, we would not necessarily get it.

So far J and I have short listed two places: Apartment 1 that I wrote about previously, ( Read more... )

After weeks of lurking on Swiss real estate websites, I have finally shortlisted some apartments that we hope to see in June. I did have my eye on some houses in the countryside but it turns out that it would be quite difficult to swing those past J's office bureaucracy. Living in a 'villa' (which really means 'cottage') sounds too ostentatious to ( Read more... )

J and I spent part of the long weekend giving our kitchen a deep clean and decluttering. It's amazing how stuff just accumulates, and some of the stuff I didn't even buy - they were things that my mother gave to me because she thought I would use them, but really I just stuck them somewhere and forgot about them ( Read more... )