Ticket to Ride (and Easyjet don't care)

I have been packing for ten days.

To be more specific, I have been packing then unpacking then packing again for the last ten days, boxing up all my worldly possessions and redistributing them across three different cities, not all in the same country. Brighton - Guildford - Munich, those have been the triumvirate of destinations in my life over the past few days. 

Now as I sit here on the plane, my one-way ticket LGW - MUC stored on my phone rather than romantically clutched in my hand, I realise that in the last week and a half this is probably the longest period I have stayed still (other than for the requisite eight hours of sleep I need each night that restores just enough humanity to allow me to rejoin the species each morning).

There is a crick in my neck and earlier as I was loading my luggage onto the conveyor belt something popped in my lower back. Don't worry though, these are not ailments. No, these aches and pains are the trophies of moving. In this case it is something slightly more exaggerated than dumping your stuff at your parents’ house between jobs (although don’t get me wrong, that was the Guildford part and took up pretty much five of the last ten days).

Welcome to moving upgraded.

This is emigrating.

For at least the next year I shall be living in Germany, propelled into this extraordinary change by wanderlust, adrenaline and love. This heady combination has over the past few months caused me to pack up a much beloved flat in the seaside English town of Brighton, decant most of my detritus at my horrified parents' home in Guildford and finally siphon off a few choice garments and photos to start a new life with in Munich.

Of course, I was largely distracted during the whole process, trying to courier contracts from afar and sort out exactly which direct debits I needed to cancel from a long list of phantom payees. Such is the all-consuming nature of emigration that the bureaucracy and organisation of moving country takes up so much attention that you almost miss the enormity of it. Which is just as well really, as it is only as I sit here in seat 19D, flight EZY8985, that I begin to grasp what it is to move country and your whole life as you knew it.

It's kinda crazy.

Nothing exemplifies this more than trying to start a new existence with one piece of checked-in luggage and one carry-on (and believe me Easyjet insists on one and only one carry-on). Too cheap to upgrade to speedy boarding as I'd rather save my cents for Oktoberfest beer rather than boarding privileges, I had to be creative. It started with the age-old Asian grandma trick of wearing as much as physically possible. Whereas my grandmas used to bundle up to stave off the cold on the long haul, air-conned flight from Sri Lanka to icy England, I did it purely to maximise my Munich autumn wardrobe. Of course wearing a coat, scarf, jumper and boots on the hottest day of the year in the UK raised suspicions. Hardly surprising I was taken aside at the Gatwick security and strip-searched (literally) and asked for an explanation as to why I was wearing two bras. There is no short answer to this. 

Having been returned my undergarments, which had to be taken off to be individually examined with a handheld metal detector, I made it three metres from the melee of airport security before I spied another way to expand my luggage allowance. Within the sleek white galleyways of duty-free I approached the MAC stand desperate not so much for new provocatively named makeup but rather for the coveted plastic bag stamped with "duty-free" on it. Knowing that Easyjet allows one extra duty-free bag in addition to a carry-on suitcase I had no qualms in asking the bemused assistant for a large carrier bag for my two lipsticks. Forget the UK 5p plastic bag charge, the £28.60 I spent in partial effort to get a poly bag could be one of the most nonsensical things I have ever done. As my payment went through I realised for that sum I could have simply purchased another piece of checked luggage.

Still smarting from this realisation I decanted some contents from my suitcase into the precious plastic bag whilst other passengers glided by, ridiculously unencumbered. Some of them, I spotted, had the smallest of purses as their carry-ons, practically skipping with the ease of travel. I, on the other hand, stumbled behind these carefree jetsetting gazelles, classlessly fishing my passport from a plastic bag and trailing scarves from my pocket like a really shabby and overheated clown.

This is not the way I like to travel, I hasten to add, but this is what happens when you (well I) emigrate. It is messy, extreme and overwhelming. What else do you expect from upending a whole life to try something completely different on another landmass? But for all the hassle and lopsided lugging of carry-on baggage, I am finally here, buckled in for one and a half hours of enforced rest, which ironically correlates with the actual process of emigration.

That gives me one and a half hours to regroup and repack my hard-earnt plastic bag.

What then? 

And then the adventure really begins.