What a wonderful website, been reading for a while but just joined.
Currently living in Cambridge, Ontario, Canada with my wife and 10 month old baby and planning to leave Canada behind. I always get puzzled just for a few seconds when I see someone wishing to leave Switzerland and move to Canada or somewhere else, then I realize we all have different desires. There are many people that wish to live in Canada and vice versa
In any case we have many reasons for leaving, a few being:
1. Our life goal is to travel as a family, I love the fact that I can go to a different country without flying and be there in a few hours. Especially with air travel becoming so strict and out of control.
2. We are both originally from Hungary and my wife's parents still reside there, it would be nice to be closer to them and other European friends.
3. We do not enjoy the so called "Western Society" that much, sadly it has spread across the globe but there are still a few civilized countries that have not been infected by it, Switzerland being one, least in my opinion
Everyone seems to be so helpful, and I do have questions on different topics, so off I go to the other forums.
I'm sure that you'll enjoy life in Switzerland. My wife and I moved to Switzerland from Waterloo, Ontario, just up the road from you.
If you need to ship some stuff over here when you move, then I can highly recommend a company in Kitchener, Ontario, who shipped almost 300 kgs of our stuff a couple of years ago from their warehouse in Kitchener to Geneva airport for under CAN$ 1000 in about 7 days! I think the company was called "KW International Shipping", or something similar. If you are interested then I can look into this and give you more solid contact info. We also had some other friends who moved to Zurich 6 months earlier and used that company, and were similarly pleased with their service.
Thank you for your reply. I filled out a few forms online to get a qoute from international movers, They asked lots of details only to find out in the end that they cannot give out a qoute unless they come visit our apartment.
I looked up the company you stated and got their number. $1000 is indeed cheap and appriciate your help!
I actually work out of Waterloo , so what made you move, did you speak the language at all when you arrived? It's great to see people who have moved from Canada to Switzerland, especially from my area .
Regarding the price quote for shipping, I already knew the exact dimensions and weights of the boxes that I wanted to ship, so the quote wasn't too complicated for them to do. You said that the movers wanted to visit your apartment before giving you a quote, this makes it sound like you're planning to ship furniture. The cost of doing that rarely makes it worthwhile over selling your stuff and buying new/used when you get here (Ikea prices are virtually the same here as in Canada).
As for what made us leave Waterloo - we were both graduate students at the University of Waterloo, and were looking to go somewhere a bit different after getting our degrees. I got offered a research position by a professor who was about to move his lab to Lausanne. We liked the idea of being in the middle of western Europe (my family is all in England), plus my wife had lived in Switzerland briefly several years before and enjoyed it, so we decided to go for it. We have never regretted it and are really enjoying it. What you said about it being a bit flat in southern Ontario is very true - we cannot imagine going back to live in such a geographically uninteresting region now we have experienced the good life (we both love to hike and bike).
Our French was pretty basic when we arrived - just what we remembered from high school and what we had used since then in visits to France and Quebec. My French is still pretty marginal, though much better than it was, and my wife's is now quite reasonable. However, because of the research jobs, we both work mainly in English. We're often in the German-speaking part of the country or Germany itself, so we've also picked up quite a lot of basic German without really trying very hard.
My wife and I love to hike and camp. Can't wait to travel all of Europe.
Regarding the furniture I agree with you, can you please call my wife and tell her .
She want to move the furniture so when we arrive there and move in it will feel like home. Most of our pieces are from Ikea, we love the contemporary look. I will try to convince her to leave the Ikea furniture behind that we can replace..... What woman doesn't want new furniture
Do you have a rough idea on how much it would cost, I contacted the international movers to just get an idea. We live in a 70m2 apartment with maybe 8 pieces of furniture not much. You know Ikea furniture is light as feathers. Any case no big deal, I am sure will end up just packing up the neccessities and shipping boxes over, much easier to buy new furniture to match the new layout and feel of the new apartment.
I am trying to get a job with RIM, not sure when you moved away from here but RIM is huge now, they have 23 office buildings in the area already. Maybe they will open an office in Switzerland.
Yep, I certainly know RIM, and many people who have worked there. I'm not sure that they'll be able to help to get you to Switzerland, though.
As for the furniture, some of the Ikea stuff might be worth shipping because it can be flat-packed so that it is not too bulky. I spent a few months preparing for our move because I finished my thesis before my wife finished hers, so I spent a lot of time deciding what to bring over here, what to sell, and what to store at her parents. This included doing some practice packing, measuring, and weighing, so that I could use some accurate cost estimates to make some informed decisions. You may want to do the same, but only if you're as obsessive about packing as me.