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So you’ve decided to move to some far off exotic land, where nobody speaks English and the local delicacy doesn’t take quite take your fancy, or maybe you’re just hopping across the channel for a few months! Either way, here’s some things you can expect to feel, perhaps not in this order and perhaps all at the same time before you find yourself at the beginning of the spiral your mind is about to take you on all over again…
Excitement and curiosity
This is quite possibly the MOST adventurous adventure thing that you have ever done in your life, moving away on your own to a place that you’ve always wanted to spend months exploring whilst getting a taste for local life! This is your chance to grasp at life with both hands, so you spend hours every day researching everything from flat rentals to how much a pint of milk costs in the local supermarket. At this point, it all seems dream-like and so far off that it is basically a fantasy of better days!
Reality of what you’ve committed to
This feeling can hit at any stage in the build-up to your move… Maybe you’ve just booked your flights or got hired for a job in your dream destination and all of a sudden, you realise that in precisely 54 days, 16 hours and 24 minutes you will be waving farewell to your beautiful, homely, comforting motherland and hopping aboard a plane to some very unknown and foreign place where you may or may not have somewhere to live when you arrive. Scary.
What do you take?
After spending hours researching the climate, local amenities, fashion trends and food, you have finally been able to put together a couple, or maybe five suitcases, filled with all the things you might need. From an extensive array of medicines to your humungous stash of teabags (foreign tea is just not as good) you have enough supplies to last you through a zombie apocalypse and another three suitcases of clothes because even though you decided a summer wardrobe would be most appropriate for the Sahara Desert, you’ve packed your ski gear as apparently it gets a bit nippy at night…
Drowning in your own social life
Before you go, you NEED to meet up with everyone who is vaguely important in your life to make sure they know all about your trip and can remind you how lucky you are and how much they will probably miss you. This is also important so that they don’t think you’ve dropped off the edge of the earth when you stop replying to their texts (you don’t want to pay 50p every time you have to reply to a text asking when you’re “free to meet up”). The only problem with this is that you forgot how many people this involves. Aunties, uncles, grandparents and then all the closer friends you’ve acquired from school, university and who knows where else; this is more of a mammoth task than you had first anticipated!
Brushing up on the local lingo
Everything is booked, you fly out in less than a month and all of a sudden you realise that if someone at your new job asked you to fetch them a stapler, you would have no clue what they are saying. Refusing to fail at the final hurdle, you order a horde of phrasebooks which you have a quick glance over before deciding to wing it and hope they only ask you to make coffee for the next year. How hard can it be to pick up a new language right? If you’re not working, then all you need to know is what meat it is in that weird looking meat and how to barter for those edgy looking tie-dyed trousers. Easy.
Good luck to everyone going off on their travels in the near future, be brave and if the food smells bad, it probably is so maybe don’t eat it… If you’re as terrified, clueless and excited as I am to start my foreign adventures, then I’m sure it’ll be an interesting and memorable trip to say the least!
Sources:
http://its-leviooosa.tumblr.com/post/45929666050/me-when-a-teacher-ask-me-to-deliver-a-message
https//www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLztAHXmlMZFRf1K4I7ut2ZvHMfrPW9md1
http://www.warnerbros.com/horror-classics-volume-one-collection
http://sandandglass.tumblr.com/post/120846731272/amy-schumers-dating-life-the-graham-norton-show
http://wordstuck.co.vu/post/75100393028
http://its-leviooosa.tumblr.com/post/45929666050/me-when-a-teacher-ask-me-to-deliver-a-message