The move

I'm already in Lyon! But it haven't been easy!

We planned to do everything in around three weeks, which looked enough for a first settling in, and it was, what we didn't know at that moment is the big effort it supposed to get there.

Our first week was in Madrid in order to separate the things we wanted to keep in the house, the things that we wanted the moving agency to take and the things that we wanted to carry ourselves in the car. It didn't suppose too many problems really, the guys of AGS were very professional, they spent a full day to pack everything with care and after we were ready to take the car and go!

We tried to have a relaxed trip so we stopped in Barcelona which is just in the middle of the way to Lyon. There we have good friends and we enjoyed a great dinner with them. The next day was most of the road trip in France, many highways to pay, but no issues reported.

The arrival was the moment to clean the apartment and to paint some walls (as it was too white for us!!), just after we had to buy all the missing furniture and all the appliances. These were very busy days! The good thing is that it gave us the possibility to start getting in touch with the shops, malls, etc.

Still, the worst part was about to come when we had to assemble all the furniture from IKEA (1.2 tons!!) and to set up the appliances in a badly designed kitchen furniture... For the IKEA thing we finally had to hire two guys to assemble a big part of them as it was far too much to do in the time we had left.

Finally the result of the move was a beautiful and ready-to-use apartment and the balcony packed with empty boxes.

Negotiating

I have mentioned before about the painful process to get a formal proposal from my company, however when it finally arrived I was not able to negotiate much, it was a pretty standard expat contract and there was not a lot of margin. Basically:

• Money for a house
• Relocation agency to find a house
• Yearly travel allowance
• Settle in bonus
• International medical insurance
• Car loan with very low interest
• Finance advice for the taxes

In my case I had some constraints to travel with my husband at the same time, so I negotiated an extra travelling allowance for the first months in order to have the possibility to see each other every weekend. This last condition was easy to get, however the amounts of the different standard conditions were very much fixed and there was no option to change a comma.

The beginning

Picture by Lucy Nieto

Basically it all started in December 2009, when the boss of my boss offered me a change of job, an upgrade after 2 years and 6 months working for the company. I accepted with no doubts, the only possible issue was that at that time it was not clear if the position was in Madrid or in Paris. They told me the new job was depending on a project and that I would be slowly taking it over in the next months. It was true in terms of work, but not true in terms of clarity on my future destination and there were also many issues in the middle that ended up with new people on board and with a formalization that happened only in March 2011 (yes, one year and 4 months after...). 

The result of all this was that I was finally moving to Lyon in France!! 

Introduction

Hello everybody, my name is Javi and I'm here to tell the story of what is happening to me since the last few months.

I've been given an expat assignment and I'll be moving from Madrid to Lyon shortly.

I will be explaining what are the main phases I've been through, try to give the best tips for you if you face a similar situation and also explain how does the life in Lyon look like.

I wish I'm constant enough to meet my objectives!!

PS: Sorry for the mistakes I'll centainly do in my texts, unfortunately I'm not a native english speaker...