Things No One Tells You About Moving to a New Country

7 Things No One Tells You About Moving to a New Country<br /><br />We at Cracked are experts at moving house. Often at great speed, barely ahead of grizzled detectives weve pushed over the edge. They were easier to push because they had nothing to lose, and so werent carrying much. When people send us mail they just follow the trail of chiefs desks cracked by someone slamming down their badge and gun. and places where the human soul doesnt dissolve. For the full moving experience you need to cross the planet. I recently transplanted my entire life from Toronto to Oxford, England. Because I was sick and tired of nobody having an accent.<br /><br />Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images News/Getty Images<br /><br />They dont even say oot. ITS A POLITE LIE!<br /><br />For anyone considering a transoceanic move, I have some important lessons.<br /><br />7. Get Rid of Stuff Right Now<br /><br />As soon as you decide where youre going, pick up something precious and hurl it out the window. This will get you into the right attitude for what comes next. If you break the window, even better, as the increasing discomfort will motivate you to move and also make things easier for thieves. Or as I now call them, Helpful Crap Moving Buddies.I divided my belongings into Stuff I Want to Bring Bring and Stuff I Can Sell, and only a day before the flight realized this left a third quantity: Crap A vast quantity. Its the missing matter of the universe. Its not dark matter, it was just covered in dust and stacked on shelves behind useful things and ignored for so long that even quantum mechanics had forgotten it was there.<br /><br />Youll invite friends round to take whatever they want. Thats the wrong attitude. Theyll only take the cool stuff you could shift on Craigslist anyway. You need to lock them in your house, Saw style, with a pressure plate activated door that only opens when they carry sufficient weight out of your home.<br /><br />6. Camp at Home<br /><br />Pitch a tent in your sitting room and start burning furniture for warmth. This has the twin benefits of making anywhere you go look good and constantly reducing the volume of crap youll have to deal with.<br /><br />Forget that new job. Lets just stay home and capture door to door marketers for food.<br /><br />This simple life means you can sell/give away everything in your house. Because anything kept to the last minute will go unsold. Unsold to assholes who say they definitely want it and then call back five hours before your flight to demand you drive it to a small town youve never heard of despite living in the country for almost a decade. Which you couldnt do even if you had a car, were able to drive, didnt hate them now, and werent currently pressure testing your relationship by playing five dimensional clothing Tetris with three dimensional suitcases.ITS NOT LIKE YOU NEED ANY UNDERWEAR, YOU SPEND SO MUCH TIME WITH THAT SLAG IN THE OFFICE!<br /><br />5. The Real Work is Paperwork<br /><br />The government doesnt care when you move within a country, because youre still their problem either way. And theres a decent chance youll disappear into a drifters organic leather collection on the way.<br /><br />Its a bit more complicated when two people from different countries move from a third country to a fourth. Thats enough for a World Cup qualifier bracket, and I think we involved as many support staff. When you try to enter a country, they understand that the pen is mightier than the sword and use that fact to mount an armed defense. Because both blades and paperwork can kill you with a thousand cuts. This is now standard. The last people to move across this kind of distance without an effective Masters in Form Filling did it because they were carrying M1 Garands, which I cant recommend these days, no matter how frustrating the paperwork gets.<br /><br />This is my rifle, this is my gun! It aint no use for fillin T1s!<br /><br />We spent weeks murdering trees, ritually defacing their flesh with ink to satisfy the arcane gods of bureaucracy, a ceremony that revealed some bizarre things. For example, I discovered that Im British.<br /><br />Rather, Im dual citizenship Irish and British. A nationality isnt normally something you discover late in life, finding a Union Jack stuffed down the back of the shamrocked sofa of your citizenship. When Ireland went through one of its standard NO WORK ANYWHERE periods, my father engaged the standard Irish crisis response of LEAVE. Mum went to keep him company, and did such a good job she earned that job description. We later returned to the Emerald Isle to make sure I was fitted with the best possible accent.<br /><br />Also, for security purposes all border staff are kept in sealed boxes, communicating with the outside world only through a complicated system of knocks and body odors. Making it impossible for them to pick up the phone for thirty seconds to check if someone speaks English. Or if an entire University speaks English. So we delayed our move for an entire season while she sat on an elementary English exam.