Throwback: The last few days in Singapore. Our ‘Get Out of Jail Not So Free’ card

We have made the decision literally two seconds ago. We will leave Singapore. For good. Next week.

Those of you who have followed me and especially this Expat Diary for a while will have noticed that our mood has changed over our time here. While we were initially super excited, followed by lots of uncertainties yet optimism with the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, the past few months have felt endlessly drawn out. And as my mom uses to say, it’s better to make a painful break than draw out the agony. So we decided to end this shitshow and leave the city that has brought us so much pain. Although the decision was actually not driven by Singapore sucking hard, because the opportunity came up to go somewhere else, aka the U S A. Funny enough, this is where we originally wanted to move to anyway, remember?

And since Singapore has surprisingly decided just recently that they will proceed with another kind of lockdown (we call it some sort of Circuit Breaker 2), this drastically limits our possibilities to prepare here. We can currently only meet one other household and a maximum of two people. The restaurants and sports studios are closed, and we are tracked via the TraceTogether device at every turn.

Either way, we have reached a stage that we don’t feel worth living, as dramatic as that may sound. But still, we have our furniture here, our friends, and basically, our whole life, which makes it hard to just make the cut from one day to the other, after all.

The US Embassy and the current Covid related restrictions in Singapore

However, after we also learned yesterday that the American Embassy is only accepting emergency appointments from US citizens, there is no other option than to return to our home country promptly to sort out the organizational issues from there. Alternatively, we could wait indefinitely… but with last year’s experience in Singapore, we don’t see that as an option – who knows if the embassy will even open again this year, or if additional measures might not further complicate the moving organization. As a matter of fact, the two-person-per-household rule also applies to services of any kind, including moving services, which means that only two people can be at our place at one time, limiting any moving service capacity right now and delaying anything further.

Grit your teeth, and let’s move

So, without further ado, we decided and booked a flight. But other than originally planned, not directly to the US but to Germany. So, from there, we will have to arrange everything else. And since we got to a point where we just want to get out of here, we booked the first flight we could. Which happens to take off in eight days.

Until then, we have a looootttt to do.

// this is a retrospective post that dates back to June 2021.