The road to Kuala Lumpur: Leaving the UK

Wow... where have the last two months gone? I can't believe that we have had parties, packed up our home, moved continent, enrolled in a new school and have already had a short school holiday break. It's been amazing yet exhausting.

August 2014

To add to the whirlwind of emotions, the daughter also dyed her hair: just to stress me out further. It looked amazing when it was bright pink, but I kept thinking about the uniform policy and would begin to breakout into a cold sweat.

The journey to Manchester Airport was less stress thanks to our very good friend, Caroline. She drove us to the airport, to make sure we got on the plane... maybe she thought the only way they would ever win at the pub quiz again was to ensure I couldn't join them!

The family also turned up to see us off. Again, I think this was to ensure we didn't change our mind.

We arrived at Departures with plenty of time to spare - or so we thought - but then we had to tackle airport security.

I never realised that lipstick and a small tub of lip gloss are classified as a liquid... how inept of me to not read the paperwork properly. We were too concerned with weighing the baggage to ensure that we each only had 30kg of luggage - wow all of our needed possessions in 120kg - that I failed to realise the lipstick rule.

As we had swapped and changed around possession from one bag to another, we had the odd rogue lipstick or lipgloss in three of the four hand luggage. Along with the normal queue, this delayed us in security for over fifty minutes. Its so embarrassing for your bag to go through the machine again and again and again. I was beginning to panic that I wouldn't have time to buy my duty free.

Travelling to a dry-ish country (or very very expensive booze) would not be pleasant without a bottle of gin from duty free. Eventually, we were through, in duty free (gin, make-up and Marc Jacob's Daisy) and walking to the gate... not long now and we would be arriving in our new home.

With a brief stop in Dubai - wow the heat sure hits you as you leave the plane - we had soon travelled 6,600 miles from the UK to MY and had arrived in KL.

After a good night's sleep we were soon put to work:

Reception

Yes - we have an actual office here. We have our own desks (no hot seating), a photocopier / printer and a terrific view.

Epsom College in Malaysia

And before we knew it the next few weeks, of living in Cyberview Apartments, surrounded by friends and colleagues, and setting up the school, flew by.