 Hello and welcome back to my channel. My name is Jackie and for the past year, in fact more than a year now, I've been talking about an impending move to Switzerland and that is finally happening in one week's time. So I thought I'd do a moving vlog and take you along for the ride. So if you've been watching my recent videos you'll know this is my second packing video and in fact I don't even think you can see the suitcase with the camera angle at the moment. But um that's okay because you've already seen me pack once. So today I thought I'd just give you an update on the immigration situation. So both my husband and I have been approved for a residence permit for Switzerland. Mine is for employment because I work for a Swiss company and his is to go over as my spouse. And in order to get our residence permits we need to go to a biometric centre in our city which is Lausanne and get our fingerprints done and our photos done. So I did that a few weeks ago and his appointment is scheduled for when we arrive. And what happened at the end of the appointment when I was there was they said oh we're going to post it to you. I'm like great where are you going to send it? I don't live here yet. And they couldn't tell me, they had no idea. So I think there are three possible places my residence permit could show up. One is here which I think is fairly unlikely. Another place is the office of the company I work for. And then the final place is my boss's former address which he said I could use on the residence permit application form because you need a probable address in Switzerland in order to apply for the permit. So we've got everyone checking their mailboxes for a residence permit for Jackie. The challenges I just found out this week that if your name isn't on the mailbox, which obviously it isn't because I don't live there, apparently they don't leave it. Like they leave a collection slip for you. So we just added my name to the mailbox I think two days ago. So I'm hoping it just hasn't been delivered yet. Not that it's been delivered and like the delivery failed. So residence permits will happen at some point if they never arrive. I assume I can ask for another one because it's all been approved but yeah if I can't that's going to be interesting. After residence permits our next priority is finding somewhere to live which has opened up a whole new kind of worms that I wasn't expecting. So Switzerland will be the fifth country that I've lived in including Australia and every other country. So I went to the UK then France then Estonia. Every other place I've lived I had a week or two of temporary accommodation when I arrived and I've been able to find a place to rent in that time. To be completely fair though the so London and Paris they aren't really comparable because I was looking for a room in a house share whereas now now I'm a grown-up and married. So my husband and I are a lot obviously looking for an apartment of our own. So the situation is more comparable to Estonia but in Estonia I found a place within the first two weeks. I thought okay can Airbnb for the first two weeks? I've got the first week that we're arriving there off so that should give us time to be like full-time house hunters. And then I was looking into the documents we need to apply for a place to live. And one of the mandatory documents you need is a they call it an extract from the debt collection registry which is I'm assuming the Swiss equivalent of a credit report. So one of the property websites says oh you can order yours online here it'll be delivered in a couple of days. So I put in the order and nothing came. So I then emailed them saying look did this order a couple of days ago when will it arrive? And they got back to me saying oh the address you provided is in Estonia we can only do this for Switzerland. I'm like well I'm moving to Switzerland from Estonia I've never lived there before so what do you suggest? And they're like maybe you can get a credit report from where you live now. So I requested one in Estonia which has been provided in Estonian so it's not useful to anyone outside the country but my husband is a former graphic designer and he looked at them and said okay with this and like my colleagues translating I can create an English version that'll still look legit so I'm like okay problem solved. Then we were in one of the expat groups on Facebook and my husband found someone who's basically like a consultant for people moving to Lausanne and she said they don't accept credit reports from other countries so it's like how do you move to Switzerland for the first time and find somewhere to live? So then I turned to my colleagues because even though it is an international company and people are working from various countries because we're all remote now there are people who work from the head office who haven't moved there from somewhere else and basically everyone says what you've got to do is go to Switzerland find temporary accommodation for three months once you've got your temporary accommodation that'll be enough history for them to do the debt report and you'll also be able to get your three salary statements which is one of the other requirements though I wasn't too worried about the salary statements because neither my husband or I are switching companies with the move the only difference for me is that my pay slips will be provided in Swiss francs instead of euros and hopefully they'll be a little bit higher as well because the cost of living is much higher over there than it is here but aside from the pay slips this debt registration is still a problem so now I'm not sure if we're going to be able to find somewhere to live when we get there which is obviously not ideal so there's all this conversation on slack happening from expats in Switzerland and I was like oh my god we're not going to be able to find anywhere to live and we're going to have to find like a sublet for a couple of months we'll need to move every couple of months and it's just you know it's been a somewhat stressful year and this process has been somewhat stressful as well it's like oh I just wanted to go smoothly at this point um but then one of my colleagues contacted me directly saying when she arrived she had an Airbnb booked for the first three weeks she made finding an apartment her full-time job and she was able to find one in that time she also said that for the debt registration extract she used the Airbnb's address and she did that in the first week of so I've done a sneaky in that I applied for the extract on Friday using my boss's address so the one that I had in the residence permit application and you're supposed to submit your residence permit I submitted my passport instead but I said look I'm waiting on the residence permit to arrive I can send a letter of invitation if wanted or if necessary so hopefully that works and I more want it to work because I don't want to get blacklisted for when I apply for it again but um yeah we'll see what happens so hopefully we get this document and can find a place fairly easily if not there are a lot of people like on Facebook who are you know doing a semester abroad or in another city who have a place that's available for six months or so there are a lot of these small sublets so I think that might even be a better solution because it means we go into a place it's already furnished and we don't need to buy a furniture but we'll see so I have these two rather big handbags and I think I'm going to put my clothes into them to save space in the suitcase other than finding a place to live the other priorities when we first get there are getting Drew's residence permit application finalized as well as opening bank accounts though I don't think it will be possible to apply for a bank account without having an address so it'd be interesting to see how we go it has now been a week and we're moving out of our apartment this afternoon to stay in a hotel tonight before our flight to Switzerland at 7 a.m. tomorrow and I feel sad and it's strange because everyone keeps asking if I'm excited about the move and the truth is that I'm not and I don't know if it's just because I'm exhausted because the past three months since the process transition from my employer side to my side has been exhausting with all of the documents we've had to gather and the different applications we've had to do and even applications to get documents in order to do applications and then having it all done and finding out that the process for getting an apartment over there is going to be just as difficult like that's been really tiring and I was comparing it to having a business that's in debt the other day where if you start a new business and you make a whole lot of like purchases at the beginning so you invest a whole lot in a website and like coaching program and marketing and so on that means you're not starting your business at zero in terms of income and revenue you're starting at a negative maybe tens of thousands in the negative or for a bigger business could be hundreds of thousands millions in the negative and the challenge with that is that in order for your business to break even it needs to do so much more than if you were just starting off a freelance services and had no outlay so starting in the negative means your business needs to be so much more successful to not even be successful to break even and i feel a little bit like that with the move to switzerland in that it has taken so much work and so much energy and so much like cost as well because doing all of this has been expensive i mean i had to fly to switzerland for a day last month and it's taken so much from us that i feel like switzerland it doesn't even just need to be a nice place to live at this point like it needs to be this is like the break even point for this process and at the moment we're way down here i you know the frame's not big enough to have where my hand is but we're so far in the negative now that switzerland like needs to be spectacular just for us to break even on this energetic and emotional investment and i don't know if it can like i don't know if any place can and that makes me even sadder because i remember last april when before i even interviewed for this job what actually started it was i had a recruiter contact me on linkedin about another role in the same city saying how would you like to work in beautiful switzerland and i was like hell yeah that sounds awesome so obviously that job didn't work out but it led me to apply for this one because it was also based in lausanne and last april i was so excited about the prospect of moving to switzerland and being somewhere new and now it's been over a year like a year and a quarter slightly more than that even and all of that excitement's gone and the thought of moving somewhere else now like if we're leaving estonia the only place i really want to go is home so it almost feels like going to switzerland is not the beginning of a new adventure it feels like it's a detour on our way home which is another good emotional space to be in and i'm trying not to put too much stock into it because like i said i am so tired i know my husband is as well and that obviously affects your emotions but it's strange to be like starting something new and almost feeling like it's a chore at this stage and i don't know what to do about that i don't know if there is anything we can do about it until we find somewhere to live but that's where i am and something else contributing to the sadness is that like for the past couple of months i thought drew and i could you know do all of the things that we really love about estonia and all of the things that make it special and see these places that we've loved and go on long walks and go out for dinner and you know really say goodbye and we haven't and admittedly i have done a lot of long walks but he didn't really seem to be that interested in doing all of this stuff and it's not really something you can force on your own so now it's the day before we leave and we haven't done any of that and i feel sad because we're saying goodbye to the city but haven't really had a chance to say goodbye and yeah it just makes me sad but on the positive note at least we're almost done the only real concern about leaving at the moment is whether our luggage will be in the weight limit or whether we'll have to pay extra fees at the airport but we'll see what happens so yeah i'm hoping we can find an apartment fairly easily now that i've got the document that i needed to get which i might tell you the story behind that when i next film but i'm not really in the right emotional space for sharing that at the moment so at the moment i don't really have anything more to say than that i just thought i'd check in before we move we are now at our airbnb in lazan and trying to figure out the next steps of this move so the things we need to get done in our first two weeks are submit my husband's biometric information which we did yesterday morning we need to register our arrival with the population control we need to find sim cards so we can get local numbers find somewhere to live and get a local bank account and with the exception of the piece we've already done so submitting my husband's information all of this is proving a little bit more complex than planned though i can't say i'm surprised about that after the process so far so before we get into these next steps i'll give you an update on what's happening with my residence permit as well as this debt collection register extract so the debt collection thing when i was doing my last pack i think i told you that i applied using my boss's address because his address was on my residence permit application so i sent that on friday and then on monday i got a reply going you are not known at this address and i said i replied going what does that mean they're like well you haven't announced your arrival here you haven't registered with the local population control i'm like oh okay well i technically haven't moved yet and i'm just trying to organize things as i move so is there anything i can do and at the same time i was talking to someone at work because we found this like one paragraph on the page about getting your debt collection extract and it said that foreign nationals with professional activity in switzerland can use their employer's address so i asked her to contact them to verify this she said yes it's okay and then in the email thread i had for the existing application i said look i check this with my employer apparently because i'm already working for a swiss company i can use their address is that okay and after i think 14 emails going back and forth we finally got to the conclusion that yes it was okay no i did not need to send and pay for a second application to do this which was what i was told earlier in the thread and i could just send them my work address and my current residential address and it would be fine what's interesting is that none of this was clear like two or three emails before the end of the thread where they told me i needed to send a new application i went back saying so i need to send a second application and if i send a second one how do we know i won't have the same problem because i still have not registered locally and i was exasperated when i got a reply going please view my colleagues previous response and i'm like your colleagues previous response does not answer this question i need to like i'm like i'm very sorry this is not clear to me these are the two things i need answered one was do i need to send a second application two was if i update the existing application or send a second one am i going to have the same problem because i still have not registered locally and he got back to me saying oh okay well just send these addresses through and you'll be fine so i was able to get my debt report using my estonian address and getting it sent to my office so i don't know how that's any different to the situation i was in before where i still don't live in switzerland at the time but at least i had the document now so that should make finding an apartment easier the other big question mark i had was about my residence permit because when i went to lasagna on the ninth of july to submit my fingerprints and photo they said oh this is going to get posted to you now and i was like where i don't live in switzerland yet so then at work i asked if they could reach out they reached out to them and they said oh it's not actually going to get sent to you until you register with the local population control so it was never going to get sent until we arrived here anyway so my residence permit in theory should have been issued it's somewhere and when we register with the local authorities then it will get sent to our current address so that's what's happening with the things that were already in progress now what's coming up the first thing which we need to do within 14 days of our arrival is registering with the local population control unfortunately i just discovered when we arrive that we need an appointment in order to do this we can't just show up at the office and to book an appointment you need to send an email where you submit all of the documents that you bring along on the day so i sent that on monday night it's now wednesday and still haven't heard back which um is a little worrying because we've only got like another 11 days when we need to do it so um once we get sim cards i might call them if i can and just see what's happening beyond the 14 day deadline though the other reason why i want to get that done quickly is because we're going to register with our current address so the air bmb where we're only going to be until the 15th and they will send our residence permits here so if we don't manage to go there and register our address until the 12th our residence permits won't arrive here until after we've left so then i've got to find a way to chase down the permits i mean the host here is pretty good so i can probably connect with him but still like it would be nice just to get this sorted so thing one registering with local authorities i'm waiting for them to get back to me about an appointment thing two is sim cards so drew is the tech person in this relationship so he was looking up different mobile plans and said oh ld looks like it has one that would be good for us and there's an ld about 200 meters from where we're staying so we went there and said oh do you have sim cards for ld mobile and they're like first you need to register online and then you can come back here to get the sim card so we're like okay so we went back to our apartment registered for the sim card and then it said oh it will be sent to you in two to three days so we can't go to ld to pick it up now the other thing is that it had one of those automatically populated address things and it did not recognize the address where our airbnb is and it would not let me manually enter it so i entered the officer's address but there wasn't a space for company so it's just going to be addressed to me at our company address so i've sent their customer support an email going can i update the address please and haven't heard back so we might also just give up on that and buy a different sim card today if we find another provider the other thing is a bank account which i need to have organized by the 15th because that's when i will first get paid in switzerland i'm hoping we will have a permanent address by the time i open that so that's probably going to be later next week and then the big thing is finding an apartment now we have a list of different apartments we're interested in most of them you need to contact them to arrange time to view it and we can't contact them via the website where they're listed because we can't register via the website where we're listed until we have swiss phone numbers there are a couple of nationalities you can have there's like switzerland france germany and probably italy as well but there are like five different area codes and estonia is not one of them so we can't use our existing phone numbers so that's another reason why we need to get sim cards so drew is currently in the shower then we'll go out and get sim cards then i'll start making phone calls to all of these places and hopefully we'll find someone who's willing to give a couple of australians a chance even though we don't have our residents permits yet so we'll see it has been a week and i thought i'd give you a quick moving update so the good news is that basically everything sorted and yes there was a lot of back and forth and documentation required but it didn't end up being much quicker than expected so my husband and i have registered our arrival which means our residence permit should be coming hopefully soon probably within the next week though small complication is that i can't get my swiss contract with work until i get my residence permit or some proof that we've arrived so i've sent um work like the receipt of when we registered our address as well as our request to book an appointment as well as the appointment confirmation so hopefully that's enough because switzerland is very expensive and i would like to start earning my swiss salary since i know i have swiss expenses the biggest news though is that we found an apartment so i don't know if i mentioned this earlier but when i was asking on slack for advice about finding an apartment and getting this deck collection registered document everyone said oh you're not going to find somewhere in two weeks it'll take three months so we found this apartment last week we created like a map with all the places we wanted to visit we visited it on friday at lunchtime and then tuesday morning we were offered the apartment so i'm just waiting for the contracts to arrive but we're not going to be homeless so we move in there on the first of september now we need to find 11 12 days of accommodation between when our airbnb stay ends and when that begins because the airbnb is unfortunately booked from the 20th of august but all in all we're feeling good and here's the map i mentioned all of the sort of teal colored pins on the map they're the different apartments we went to see so i think there are maybe 22 pins on the map right now and we actually had a few more beyond this that we also inquired about but were already taken so i've been a very bad vlogger for this move but it's because it's been very exhausting and i'm feeling particularly exhausted at the moment because we just moved from one airbnb to our second one before we move into our final apartment on the first of september and we didn't realize that the apartment was on the fifth floor with no elevator and normally that's not a problem but today we have to carry all of our luggage so here's what we carried up five flights of stairs so we've got this little duffel here and yes those are my pants on the floor because they came off as soon as we got up here there's my big backpack that was about 18 kilos at the airport i think we have suitcase one which was about 23 24 kilos small backpack we have this box which is about 20 kilos and then through here we have this suitcase which i have no idea how much it weighs at the airport it was around 23 24 but i didn't pack it as carefully so it's probably heavier drew just said it was lots so let's say 27 kilos for that one and that little duffel here and suitcase number three which is also around that 23 24 kilo range so that obviously took several trips now we are very tired but the new airbnb is like 750 meters from the lake which you can see out our window and we do have a balcony but as i mentioned i'm not wearing pants so i'm not going to step outside and give you the full panoramic view right at this moment so i've been taking a lot of long walks lately because walking has always been like a form of meditation for me it's been a way i recharge and walking around lozan i'm just in awe of how beautiful it is especially now that we're like in the south of the station area it's so green there are trees everywhere and we're so close to the lake so you just get this expansive view of the lake and the mountain and i walk down these old european streets and through parks and along the lake and i think this is so beautiful how did i get so lucky to be living here and then i need to get something done and every time the process is so complex and convoluted that i think this is the worst country in the world why are we living here so we are now in our final apartment which is very exciting i actually um intended to vlog on our moving day and then i completely forgot because i'm not a very good blogger i think i just don't have that instinct to record everything so um we did the move on wednesday the first of september i might put like a map on the screen with our various stops but it was a full day thing like we had to check out we had to pick up a van check out at the airbnb drive to ikea to pick up an order drive to a friend's place to pick up some things she was giving us which was very generous um go to another shop to see if they had anything go pick up a tv cabinet that um i got on ikea not on ikea but i got on facebook marketplace get a coffee table and so on the really good thing here though is that there is a huge facebook marketplace for like secondhand items so i think once we've got all of the major furniture we'll probably come out of it for less than 2000 francs which is pretty good when you're furnishing an empty place at the moment though we are not there yet so i am at the bedroom and i literally have like a mattress on the floor it's not very inspiring um let's go back to the light the other thing that's a little annoying is i don't have any wardrobe there's no built-in storage here or there's a little bit but not in this room so we have this mess this happened because everything was obviously packed and then i needed to find some things and i couldn't find the things so i started pulling the luggage apart but i found a wardrobe on facebook marketplace so we're going to be getting that later today so then hopefully i can unpack because i realized there are distinct steps in moving there's like the literal moving from one place to another which we did but then there's the unpacking which we haven't done yet and there's also the buying new stuff cleaning that sort of thing which we also haven't done but we're getting there so um yeah our house is we're here we are not going to be homeless which is good but it's very empty like you can hear the echo so here's our living room which is literally our coffee table and tv cabinet we have no couch yet we have no tv either but that's coming similarly with the kitchen we've just got yeah we've just got like the cabinets obviously came with and then some boxes and things because we're waiting for our stuff to arrive so my original plan with this vlog was to get to our final apartment and i'd sign off then but i feel like we're not settled yet because you've seen where we're living there's no furniture like the most complete room is the bathroom but other than the bathroom my husband set up an office which now has a desk and a chair that arrived yesterday it has two pieces of furniture and it feels like the most complete room so we're not really settled yet so i'm not sure if like maybe i should wrap things up now or if i should wait until we have everything which might be another two weeks but we'll see in any case i'm exhausted this has been such a process so here's a map so you can get a sense for what our moving day was like and feel our pain so if i zoom in this is basically Lausanne our airbnb was around here so the first thing we needed to do was get public transport up here where we were renting a truck for the day to move everything so we got i think two buses to get up here and then we had to drive back to the airbnb to clear out our suitcases then after returning to the airbnb we then drove to Ikea which is all the way down here i think it's like 44 kilometers from Lausanne which if you're Australian or American that doesn't sound like much but in Europe that's a lot so we went to Ikea picked up some things we'd ordered then we came up here to pick up some stuff from a friend of a friend so we were really lucky that one of my colleagues friends was moving and had a whole lot of stuff to give away so that really helped us out especially with kitchen stuff so picked up all of the stuff here then went back to Lausanne to drop everything off at our new apartment which is here where the j is after dropping off all of our stuff we then were picking up a tv cabinet that we found on facebook marketplace so drove up here to pick that up went back to drop it off at our apartment then after dropping it off at our apartment we needed to return the truck that we'd rented so drove back up here to drop off the truck and then had to get two buses back home so we go back home we have maybe half an hour to chill out and then we're picking up a coffee table that we also found on facebook marketplace so we rented a second car which i think we picked up from somewhere around here then drove up here to pick up the tv cabinet which was actually free so we were quite lucky then pick up our tv cabinet go home drop off the car and then we're done so that was a good 12 hour day so it is now the 26th of september i think and we are finally moved in or at least as moved in as i think we're going to be in the short term so we've got like all of the major pieces of furniture so this bedroom's all filled out we've got a couch finally we got it on monday and before then so i've got this like ikea armchair and drew has his office chair so like to watch netflix we were dragging both of these out the living room and sort of sitting next to each other on our two separate chairs it was very depressing so um when we got the couch on monday that was a big achievement and was just so comfortable and i also got a chair for my desk yesterday which is the last major piece of furniture we still need dining room chairs but we don't really eat at the table so we can go for a few months without them so given that we've got most of our stuff now i think it's a good time to end this vlog one of the things i don't have is a good video backdrop as you can see it is a little challenging finding a place to film that's not like with the windows behind you that still looks nice and all of our walls are white so there's nothing really dynamic but this is a really small problem in the grand scheme of things so before filming this i actually went through and edited the rest of the footage i have and i saw that clip from the very beginning when i was in estonia not really looking forward to this move and just exhausted and thinking you know if i go anywhere i just want to go home and i'm really happy to say that i feel quite different now that we're here both drew and i really love lazan we're in the most beautiful location we've got a park across the road where there's it was karaoke the other night on a friday night we were just randomly doing karaoke in the park but there are always like events happening because it's the tail end of summer there's like yoga in the park on a saturday morning and there's a market on a friday afternoon and then the streets around here are just so beautiful and leafy and green and like i mentioned in an earlier clip i walked through the streets and go how did i get so lucky to be able to live here which is not what i was expecting given the way i felt before we came over admittedly there are some things that are extremely frustrating the bureaucracy here is a nightmare we're trying to organize health insurance at the moment because it's mandatory and i think we signed up for it but all we got was an email confirming that we'd submitted our details but no information on the policy and no premium that needs to be paid so i replied going can you let me know if there's anything else i need to do got an automated response saying they'll get back to me within eight working days i'm like okay eight working days pass no response and then i sent another email going look this is my first time getting insurance in switzerland i don't know how it works please help me and haven't heard back to that one yet but i think i'll give them a call tomorrow if i don't hear back and admittedly these are fairly small inconveniences and a big scheme of things but they're really common basically every time we've tried to get something done here it's been this process that's involved multiple emails and phone calls and sometimes appointments in person and it's extremely exhausting so on one hand i'm walking around i'm going to a cafe around the corner that has 19 different types of hot chocolate and i'm like how did this happen i'm the luckiest person in the world and then i have to deal with some process and i'm like this is the worst country ever why am i living here so i'm assuming that frustration is going to end now that we've basically done everything except for health insurance but it has been a bit of a journey one of the more relevant things to this channel is my writing or lack thereof since we've come over because other than finishing my plotting for the glass switch i haven't done anything and i was i know not really beating myself up over it but sort of going that's really interesting that i can't seem to make myself right and then i happened to be looking at my good reads and i realized i haven't even read anything since i've been here like i've read so if you see my quarterly reading wrap ups you'll know i sort of read like 20 books a quarter this quarter i've read four and the last one i finished on the second of august which was the day we came here so it was in the flight over here so i think that just goes to show like how all consuming this process is even with the having time off work so i took a week off work when we first got here we had two days off for moving so one for moving between mbs and one for moving here and even with that like just not having the capacity to do anything is i can't think of a word it's just strange because most of the time when you know you're not doing what you said you would you're not writing every day or working out or practicing your instrument or doing whatever it is that will bring you closer to your goals it's usually like oh you're lazy you're not disciplined enough like that's the sort of attitude whereas like with this i just haven't had the capacity so i'm not sure what that means for my future as a writer especially since like i've struggled to write consistently ever since i got this job and i'm not sure how much i've covered this on this channel but before i started this channel i had a business and i ended up selling it because i wanted to focus on my writing and just in the last week i went i think i replaced my business with this new job which is not what was meant to happen so obviously i'm committed to this job for at least the next year because we have a one-year lease in this apartment but it is interesting to think about and i wonder if like it's a form of self-sabotage where basically i put myself in a position where i was over committed to other stuff or i wonder if maybe like now that we're settled in and life is getting back to normal i will find more capacity so we'll see ultimately though i just wanted to check in because it's been like eight weeks since i started filming this vlog so it needs to end at some point that all in all we're really happy to be here very grateful that it happened despite the hiccups when it comes to writing and bureaucracy so i guess that's it for me for the time being so i'd be curious to hear from you like how do you keep up your writing or whatever your thing is when you have so much going on in your life is it something where you do continue to be really strict and if you've got for example a daily writing practice you do continue that regardless and it doesn't matter what's happening in your life or are there times when you do take a break because you don't have the capacity i'd be really curious to see how you tackle these sorts of situations and if there's something else i could be doing or something i could learn from you other than that i hope you're having a great day and i will see you next time bye