Switzerland - Packing to Go

Zurich - All Packed Up!

Theoretically, my return back to Egypt should have been quite easy – I had only brought three suitcases over with me, so that was all I could bring back. How hard can it be?

However, I was living in Switzerland.

On the positive side, unlike when I first moved to Egypt from Switzerland, my deposit this time was relatively modest and since I was sub-renting the flat, the whole handover procedure was less fussy. Denise wasn’t going to be moving back into the flat. On top of that, the owner of the flat (from whom Denise was renting) planned to combine my flat with the one next door, so she wasn’t too particular about its state of cleanliness because it was going to descend into chaos anyway with the building works. In addition, Denise had kindly provided me the phone number of a cleaner. So, really, it was relatively easy. The fates were smiling down on me yet again.

However, it took me some courage to ring the cleaner as I don’t like phoning and especially when it’s not in my own language. The first few times, I couldn’t get through. Then, when I did, I ended up speaking to a stranger who was going to relay the message on for me. She sounded Chinese and was speaking Swiss German. I felt less than confident that I had made myself understood in my English-accented High German and was vaguely worried that maybe I shouldn’t have spoken about the cleaning to this stranger.

Nevertheless, the cleaner’s husband visited my flat, nodded, and said “same as last time?”, so I just said “yes”. He asked the date I wanted it and left. After that, I didn’t get any further confirmation. I was a little worried. So worried, in fact, that I phoned again (they hadn’t asked my name, they hadn’t asked for my phone number). She confirmed she would be there the following week like I was some crazy neurotic person. I had to trust to the gods.

The cleaners were good, but I always find cleaners in Switzerland quite stressful to deal with. I walked past the kitchen and one of the cleaners was drawing air between her teeth and muttering “dirty, dirty!” I went into an instant internal panic. Was I expecting too much of them to do it for the same money as Denise had suggested? Was I really a very dirty person? Was it now going to go horribly wrong?

To add to the stress, Denise had told me that the owner of the flat had expressed great displeasure at seeing a black mark in the bathroom and that this black mark had to go. Of course, this was the only thing that the cleaners could not remove. To my credit, I then became very determined somehow to remove the black mark, even though the cleaners had told me it was impossible. I managed it with vinegar in the end (and a wire scrubber) and felt suitably proud of myself, even though it meant I was behind on my packing.

I’d booked a day for washing my clothes and bed linen, etc. However, when I went down to the basement, someone was using the machines. I had booked the machines for the wrong week. Disaster! My timetabling of all the cleaning left no room for error. In the end, I carted a load of washing over to a friend’s place. It was like my student days all over again where I had no washing machine and had to walk to the university launderette and back with all my laundry. I bet that university accommodation is more sophisticated these days!

The other major problem I had was to get rid of my microwave. Since I’d been in Japan just before, I hadn’t had enough time to put it up for sale. In the end, I did the opposite of theft (but still felt suitably guilty). I trundled down the streets of Zurich at midnight with my microwave on a set of wheels, getting on and off trams, and sneaked into my office building at the dead of night and dumped it in the kitchen as a freebie. I hear that someone did take it, so all’s well that ends well.

Finally, I thought I had three suitcases, but I’d totally forgotten that I’d taken one suitcase back with me at Christmas and left it in Egypt, rationalizing that I’d never be able to take all three suitcases back at once (the three suitcases originally came over to Switzerland in two journeys as well). So, I’d been happily calculating that everything would fit into three cases and then discovered I had a third less space than I thought. Eek. But I managed better than I imagined.

Oh, and then there was the whole fiasco of remaining registered in Switzerland in the hope of still having employment in Switzerland after September. I got somewhere in the end, but it was more difficult than I had originally anticipated.

With all this to think about, I’d hardly had a moment to consider what it would be like to be finally back in Egypt again.