The big move experience :)

This comes pretty late but I guess, I can still do justice to the events ...

As many people mentioned I didn't give enough advance notice about my moving to Mountain View, California. Well it was so because of my ever changing plans and some dependency on the receiving of Visa. I was earlier planning to leave by September beginning for a month long vacation and then heading right away to work. Lately decided to not take that long vacation but instead just have a 10 days stopover. So everything got decided at very close timelines and the departure seemed quite sudden.

About the move part, well moving to a different country could be quite challenging, even if you don't have too much to carry with yourself. Here is what ended up being on my todo list, I searched for these on net and didn't find a good resource.

1) Closing Service connections
- Telephone (I had none)
- Mobile (usually straight forward, just pay the bill online and give them a call to close the account)
- Broadband (again, I didn't have to do it, but this one may take time)
Approx 2-3 days

2) Selling your stuff
Stuff which you don't want to keep or gift away. (taking photograhs and sending email to right groups help, some cities you can use craigslit service for this).

3) Moving stuff you can't sell to your parents'/relatives' place
I could really send almost all my stuff to my relative and didn't have to sell anything. This made it simple. I sent a bunch of stuff from Hyd to Pune for about 8 K, which included bike, TV, computer, computer table, cot and materess. Moving stuff domestically typically could take 3-4 days.

4) Bike/Car NOC.
This one is interesting. You need to get a NOC from the RTA in your city/state to be able to transfer vehicle to other state. With a NOC someone can drive it for 1 year without paying the road taxes again.
If you want to change the number to get a local state number, that could be done too, it would need a NOC too (AFAIK). This took me about 10-15 days in Hyderabad though it should be done quicker usually.

5) Address change/update notifications to concerned departments/services.
Best idea is to switch to electronic statements quite some time in advance.

6) Start informing your friends and relatives, can take quite some time to bid byes to people :)

7) Carry proper adaptor for devices you are carrying with yourself.


Thats about it. I think I am forgetting some stuff, will add things later.