Welp. After yet another breakdown I had the pleasure to entertain a good friend on Monday (officially "best friend in the UK"), whom I opened up to about my plans to run with the speed of light from this prison island. Emboldened by both my horrible mood and the fact that that means that there will be an end to this uncomfortable situation (uncomfortable for everybody involved, really), he began helping me making plans to get me out of here as soon as possible.
Once again, it's the feline companions that will be the biggest problem I'm going to face. Travel via airplane is ridiculously expensive (D. looked at various offers, and the cheapest quote he got was £933...), so the two possibilities "cats via road" or "take cats and everything myself and go by ferry and train" remain.
Whilst I enjoy going by train, it would probably lead to quite a few problems. I am at the moment nothing but a bundle of nerves in a steadily deteriorating shell, and a lengthy ferry-and-train journey poses several problems:
- how on earth am I going to carry around a huge kennel (7.5kg) with two nervous cats (together ~ 9kg)?
- how on earth am I going to carry the little bit of stuff that I can take with me around in addition to that?
- how am I going to store the freakishly huge kennel in the trains? That thing doesn't fit into a train. Going by Austrian train standards, it's impossible to even carry it through the trains.
- considering these issues of merely dragging my stuff around - how am I going to get from one train to the next without having a nervous breakdown?
- train waiting times - I am carrying around two nervous cats. Cats need to occasionally piss. I can't let them do that anywhere on a journey via ferry-and-train.
- the cats themselves - they're going to be paralysed with fear, particularly the nuffse. She's naturally more wary than the möffz, and hates being surrounded by more than 2-3 people, one of them should ideally be me. And when she's nervous, her asthma gets worse. Which would probably lead to me becoming hysterical.
- potential problems/delays with the papers - again, nerves.
So yeah, in my mind I'm pretty much sold on the "cats by road via a pet transport thingie"-idea. They get fed in there, have enough water, no hordes of strangers around them, there are stops for letting them use the litterbox, and the people doing this are professionals. They deal with the authorities and take care of the animal, which would leave me to be less nervous on my own. I've already gotten one quote (£180/cat, can use my own kennel - which is good, because I paid a shitload of money for it when we moved here, and I frankly don't want to sell it if possible). I trust this idea.
Let's see how much the other two companies I wrote to charge for the same service.
So now I just need to know if there's someone in Vienna where I can crash with my cats in order to be able to book the transport. Ok, wrong - first I need money, then I can do the rest. Including getting them vaccinated, microchips checked and passports updated. And then later, at most 10 days before the actual relocation, have them checked by the money grubbing thieves from the vet again, because they suck you dry of all funds you may or may not possess, knowing fully well that you're helpless without them. Grrrrrrr.
So yeah. It's a bit more stressful than I expected, which is mostly due to my already frazzled nerves thanks to the past year(s). It's times like this when I want to kick myself in the head for not having decided to do my PhD in Germany, rather than to endure my previous employer and then this kafkaesque nightmare/comedy of bureaucratic failure and existential limbo.
No comments:
Post a Comment