What to Bring When Moving to a Foreign Country

Preparing to move to another country What do i bring? What will there be to eat? I heard they eat each other there!

These questions and many more come up when you are pondering moving to another land. My step mother asked us “what will you guys eat” . For us that was a funny question, but she was serious.

It seems that somehow the American media has portrayed any other country on the planet as dangerous , or impoverished , or 5th world as they might say. Really not true. Why is it done? Well I have my suspicion’s , but I will save that for another article. Truth be told, we now live in Peru and I have never felt safer in my life.  So really what would you eat?

Peru is difficult on the food thing. Why? There is so much healthy and good food here you almost are forced to not eat so much. Ex: We love a dish that a women on the street cooks every night , its called “Salchi Papa” Now a Salchi Papa costs 4 soles, and heres what you get for your $1.30 . A piece of Chicken , usually a leg and thigh , or 1/2 of a breast, Noodles with some kinda special sauce on it, Chinese rice , French fries , and hotdogs cut up into slices. Really its a couple pound of great tasting food and plenty enough for a dinner.

Another of our favorites is Papa Rellena . Its basically mashed potatoes with meat and vegetables in the middle and deep fried, the portions here are about two of your fists , the cost 70 centavos . In American money Thats about .25 cents. So you now know that  there is plenty of food in foreign countries.

What should you bring. Clothes depending on climate. I don’t trust the travel books so google ” forums, expat, (what ever country you would like to move to) This will bring up a community of Americans that you can relate to, and they will tell you the real climate where you are thinking of moving. In fact they will help you out with most things

We always bring the following items when we come back to Peru. We buy two laptops in the United States, they are very expensive here, so we either use them or resell to help offset the travel cost. Tampons for my wife. Clothes to suit the weather. Our espresso coffee maker, AKA the vacuum kind. We also bring vitamin’s, peroxide, and some spray antihistamine (trust me if you ever get plugged up on a plane you will thank me immensely for the antihistamine suggestion)

We also bring food in a package because food in the airline industry is very expensive and they don’t always feed you when you want to be feed. Your passport of course is needed, and make sure you bring a second ID, like a drivers license or whatever id you can. The banks will require two Id’s at times , like if you need to have a moneygram sent to you.

You should have a bank card that is able to withdraw money from an ATM, most foreign countries have ATM’s now and they are usually close to where ever you are.

We also put in place a backup in case the atm thing goes down. Ours is a paypal card with enough money to carry us over for 3 or 4 months.

So grab your hat , and laptop , hop on spirit air (9 dollar fares) and get to the adventure of your lifetime.

I almost forgot, if your not knowing the language where your going a franklin hand held translator is invaluable…..but don’t buy a computer based language program, you will be able to get one where your going for a dollar or two

Anthony Gatto