The big city!

Roy and I no longer live in the sleepy, little town called Saint-Maurice. We made the move to the big smoke (HA!) of Martigny. Our main motivation for the move was the apartment is smaller, cheaper and there's more to do in Martigny. We were lucky to have found the new apartment through a colleague of Roy's who was moving out and needed someone to takeover the lease. If it hadn't have been for that, we wouldn't have moved because finding apartments isn't the easiest or funnest job in Switzerland. There's a shortage of apartments so once they're advertised for rent it becomes and brutal game of searching, applying and constant rejection.

We had to jump through many hoops to get this move underway. Firstly, since we're foreign scum (our affectionate name for non-Swiss people), we had to get someone to guarantee our lease - basically someone who is willing to put their name on the lease and pay the rent if we decide to skip town or not pay our rent. We found one of Roy's lovely colleagues who, unlucky for him, has helped us out of many pickling situations, to be out guarantor. Then we had to proove to the real estate that we don't have any debts or convictions to our names and also to proove that we have insurance to cover anything that we break. Once we'd proved that we aren't dodgy we finally found out that our application had been excepted and the apartment was ours. Then we had to go to the bank and open up an account for us to put away a couple of thousand Swiss Francs for bond and a few other hoop jumps and it was time to pick up the keys.

We met up with the real estate ladies and the previous tenant (Roy's colleague) so we could go through the entry condition report and the previous tenant hadn't finished cleaning the apartment yet. The real estate told her that if it wasn't cleaned by the end of the day she would have to pay 800 Swiss Francs for someone to come in and clean it. Wowsers! I wouldn't mind being a cleaning lady if I got 800 CHF to clean an apartment. I jokingly offered to do it for 400 but unsurprisingly, she opted to clean it herself.

To do the actual moving, we were lucky to have a lot of help from some more of Roy's colleagues. We hired a van, dumped it all in the van and two cars and drove it to Martigny to start the tedious task of getting all of our stuff up to the eighth floor. It's quite surprising how much stuff two people can accumulate in just over a year - considering we came over with 3 large bags full of stuff, we managed to fill the van to the doors.

Unluckily for us, a few days before the move, some workman started working on one of the elevators in the building. They are replacing the lifts for newer ones and the one they started working on was the lovely, large elevator. we had to try and stuff as much into the small elevator as we could in between letting other people use the elevator to get to their apartments. The building has about 13 floors so we couldn't expect people to take the stairs.

It was extremely tedious and at times frustrating but we managed to get a good rhythm going and before we knew it, everything was up in our new apartment. One of the helpers is really fit which was lucky for us because he took the things that didn't fit in the elevator up eight flights of stairs. It was a huge relief to be moved in. All that was left was to unpack and settle in.

It was sad to say goodbye to our lovely, big apartment in St-Maurice but in the short week that we spent in our new place, we settled in quite well. We have lovely views of the surrounding mountains and the valleys to the north and the east.