Nice, right? Yes, in the lower left that is a portable Weber grill taped to a file box. But don’t worry, the file box has a charcoal chimney in it, so it all makes perfect sense.
This is what it looked like when all was said and done: once we had packed everything, loaded a bunch of it into a van and had movers load the rest of it into a truck, and crammed it all into Paul and Rodda’s basement (generously donated for a year of housing our too-many-books et cetera).
And this is what it looked like in our condo, once we had packed everything we thought we wanted and needed to bring to Hong Kong into two big-but-not-super-big bags. It turned out that two of them were, despite our meticulous use of Brett and Alicia’s bathroom scale, overweight, so we started our journey with a nice overweight baggage charge. But you amortize that over ten or eleven months, well, it doesn’t seem unreasonable. (Until you arrive and learn that a bunch of the things you thought you really needed to pack because there’s no way you could find it in Hong Kong, at least not with a huge amount of effort and expense that you don’t want to have to worry about in the first few days after a long flight and a new job and a new place to live and all of that… are in fact readily available. Alas.)
This is what it all came down to. Balancing the passports on top is an especially darling aspect of this photo.
Unforbidding City 