Here I sit looking south across a sprawling urban skyline. The breeze through the balcony doors carries the unbroken and snarling opera of a very intense city. The breeze also carries a bouquet that is one part exhaust, one part ocean, one part pure energy, all tied together with the underlying scent of an open dumpster.
This is Mumbai (or Bombay), and by some counts it is the second largest city on the planet. It’s home to an estimated 22 to 24 million people and counting. One of the fastest growing cities in the world, Mumbai is a thunderous mass of growing pains. And now I’m here, just adding one more person to the heap. So for today we'll just round up and call it 24,000,001. For handy reference, that's a bit larger than Chicago. And New York City. And Los Angeles...
Combined.
This place is incredibly interesting. But before I get into all of that, you should probably suffer through a bit about me and how I got here. This little project is supposed to be as informative as possible while being no more boring than absolutely necessary. In the interest of giving useful stuff to my fellow expats, we'll start with the road to Mumbai.
My lovely wife got transferred here for work. She has the grown-up job in the family. I remodel houses and build stuff and cook things, so thankfully I am naturally portable. If I'd had a more structured career path there would have been many more difficult decisions and conversations. But as things stood I just couldn't say yes to a new adventure fast enough.
Going to Mumbai started well before the trip to Mumbai. What? Yes, a lot of ground work went into getting us here. For starters, we needed to sell about 99% of our possessions. The terms of the move package offered by The Job only let us take what would fit in an air cartage container measuring roughly 4'x5'x5'. I don't know the metric equivalent yet; I am poorly integrated. Sue me. So besides selling our house and both cars we also had to thin out personal possessions in the most aggressive manner.
Try this exercise for fun if you want: pull the stuff out of a closet in some room besides the master bedroom. Ideally it should have a single bifold door. Now put your household essentials in there. You only get to take what you can cram. (Clothes don't count. You can check a couple bags on the flight.) Then sell the rest. That's the essence of what we did. It's actually incredibly liberating to unburden yourself from all the stuff you don't truly need in your life. How many items do you own that you haven't used in the last year? Yep, me too. Plus it puts money in your pocket and lets you donate to good causes. Besides, to quote a classic film, the things you own (can) end up owning you.
So we sold the house and both cars and started crate training the cats. That is right - the four-legged fur babies got to come to the (former) Jewel in the Crown of the British Empire with us. Our third fur baby, my dog Ace, has far too many neuroses to come to a big city. Or any city, really. Instead he got to go live at his favorite place, my parents' farm in Wyoming. It made me very sad, and still does. It was, however, the right choice for him.
Also on the agenda was all the health stuff. This included getting vaccinated for yellow fever, malaria, hep A & B, diphtheria, typhoid, Japanese encephalitis, and a tetanus booster. Oh, and rabies. (I actually still have to finish up a couple of these.) That way I can pet all the stray dogs without a care in the world! We had to get our hands on our childhood immunization records, too. The cats had to get a USDA certified health inspection and their own battery of shots. If expatriating with a fuzzy family member, look into the process of the country you are headed to. Lots of this stuff has to happen on specific timelines. The U.S. NCBI has vaccination recommendations for many countries, and the agricultural department of most countries will provide pet protocol.
Remember that crate training I mentioned? Our precious little jerks were coming as carry-ons with us. That meant that we had to fulfill certain crate requirements from the airlines. To prepare our loving little shedding machines I started feeding them exclusively in the crates. I also never used the flight crates for trips to the vet; that was left to the old clunky plastic crates. My wife and I took Jimi and Quincy on car rides in their air crates, then rewarded them to excess after. Easy as that... It goes without saying that your pet might have different needs and challenges. You may not be able to fly them with you. But take heart - there are companies that specialize in moving pets. Should you have to deploy this option just know in advance that you'll need to budget it in a very serious way or just beat up a credit card or two pretty badly. Also, I strongly recommend grabbing some CBD treats from a handy dandy online seller. I don't have a control case for reference, but I am pretty well convinced that these were a lifesaver.
I'm not going to go into the joys of selling a house and cars. There are plenty of sites for that. I think. I don't care; I don't want to get into it right now.
I completely forgot to mention visas. Your company will probably do the heavy lifting on this, if you're doing a transfer type move. If not, you will have a whole other set of hurdles to address at the start of this process.
Now I've gotten us up to the last day. This consisted entirely of last minute preparations and frantic packing. Double check this, where is that, ad nauseum. I don't know that anybody ever does their final process any other way, but you definitely feel more stress when you're leaving the indefinitely. Also, our finalization was extra chaotic and shitty because I failed to get ahead of the curve on several fronts. Badly. Sometimes I have a truly debilitating case of sophomoritis. This particular moving scenario made pushing things to the last minute more heartburn inducing than ever before. This led my wife to accurately assess a few of my numerous character flaws at about 65 decibels. And boy did I have it coming. But somehow it all got done.
This is the briefest possible sketch of the prep phase. Of course I have failed almost entirely to convey the emotional stress, endless nuances, and minor challenges associated with shoehorning all this crap into your life. It's not easy, and I don't even have (human) children to worry about. When you undertake this process, it is a good idea to figure out a system of rewards to help maintain a balance. Finish a task, eat an entire pizza. That's how I did it. You can copy me or figure out what works for you. I do recommend the basic system of Finish Task : Enjoy Reward. You'll have a much harder time on your flight and beyond if you turn yourself into a raving lunatic or suffer a fun-sized stroke.
Next up, phase 1 part 2
Next up, phase 1 part 2
Vaccination Recommendations: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4896562/table/T1/?report=objectonly
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