Two years in London

Several times a day we ask ourselves how people manage it to move to countries more far away than the UK. Where we assume you have much more complicated issues to deal with (since let’s remember: the UK is STILL an EU-country). But also if you move just an one-hour-flight away the daily hassles reach from difficulties with the landlord over hard decisions to make concerning the insurances to quarrels with the travel agency. Often the processes take much longer (and strange loop ways) than anticipated. But this weekend an activity planned to be closed just in some weeks was nearly finished after 1.5 days – the selling of our furniture.

Since we are getting step by step friends the idea to live on about 50 sqm at maximum (instead of 120 sqm now) within the next two years, and the fact that the possibility to let a flat with equal size for an appropriate rent after our big adventure is at 3% (optimistically estimated), we decided to get rid of some of our stuff. Most of our furniture is older than eight years or more. That’s why we couldn’t imagine, that anybody would really like to buy it (and fixed Prices which nearly broke Alexander’s heart, who is known for operating very economically).

So we took some pictures of our things in Saturday morning, put them on the eBay-website and looked forward to a rather relaxing weekend, since in our mind the first requests would come next weekend at the earliest. Hahaha! After 30 minutes the mail account nearly exploded. We counted the emails: over 80 within five hours.

The next morning more than 25 emails again. It seemed as if some people were sitting on their mobile and waiting for a new advertisement. But most the interesting aspect was the behaviour in writing a lot of people have: no ‘hello’, no ‘thank you’ or ‘please’. Just the (short) demand to tell the phone number. Here is my top 1 in ranking: “halo comt ich morghen brauhen schrank.”, directly followed by the message: “???” when somebody recognized that something was sold to an ‘earlier bird’. But there were also a lot of nice and friendly people, but everyone wanted to collect the things within some a few hours. Bye bye lazy day. So we put on our working clothes and started to clear a lot of things out. One by one came to look for the chosen furniture. Some people looked through all the other advertised things and evinced their interest for other tables or chairs. Luckily, we could prevent them from taking away the lights or the washing machine, which we won’t sell until the end of December.

And now – between all the boxes and bags – there it is: the realisation that we will leave Cologne and live in London. An odd thought, but an exciting, thrilling, vitalizing, joyful an happy one as well!