Finding a Nursery School

After our first day of house searching with Claire, it was time to look for a nursery school for Jack.  We again had a representative from our relocation company to help us with this.  For the afternoon, we had meetings set up with 2 schools.  Now, right before Claire dropped us off after our house search, she was “kind” enough to give us a map where she had placed little stickers where all of the area nursery schools were.  Nice, huh?  WRONG.  She misplaced and mislabeled at least 2 of the schools as we were soon to find out.

About a half hour after we were dropped off, it began sprinkling mildly.  We found our way safely to the first Nursery school.  It was situated at the back of a large sports complex.  Within the complex was a nice health club and backing up to the complex was a golf club.  So, of course, as we were walking towards the nursery school, we were having daydreams of getting in a round before school or getting in a quick workout right after.  That was before we entered the nursery school / frat house. 

We were right on time for our scheduled appointment and were shown directly in.  We were asked to take off our shoes at the door.  I remember thinking that that was a good sign because they were concerned about the cleanliness.  That thought lasted about 4 nanoseconds – until we walked into the first room.  Honestly, there was crap everywhere.  Garbage was all over the floors, intermixed with the kids.  Creepy toys were everywhere.  The place was filthy.  All the while, our guide was walking us from room to room telling us about the nursery.  I wasn’t listening very hard because it took a lot of effort to not throw up in my mouth. 

It is important to be clear that at no time did I ever consider the possibility of leaving my son there.  What was weird was that I started feeling intensely guilty for even being there.  So it was with massive relief that we left that school and ventured back out into the rain.  We were on foot with no car or umbrella, but it was considerably better than the nursery.  On another positive note, it wasn’t raining that hard and we did have Claire’s map (start eerie music here).

We decided to head out to our second appointment a bit early so we referred to our trusty map.  It looked like about a 15 minute walk, so opted against researching buses, invested in a small umbrella and started our short walk.  It turns out our estimate was spot on.  We got to the area corresponding to the sticker on Claire’s map in just about 15 minutes.  On a slightly less positive note, 2 major issues began to emerge: 1) there was no school in that location and 2) we were now standing in a torrential downpour. 

After 15+ years writing software, I have learned a simple lesson.  More often than not, when I thought there was a bug in a framework component, it was actually a problem with my code.  So when we had a problem with the map, I initially assumed it was really an issue with my interpretation of the map and not the map itself.  So, we walked up and down the street where the school should have been eleventy-billion times looking for anything that looked like a school.  Nothing.

I should probably mention that we had purchased a pay-as-you-go phone earlier in the day.  Being of Scottish descent, I have a frugal streak running through me.  Obviously, we bought the cheapest phone available for  £10.  After 15 minutes looking about in the rain we gave them a call.  What you should be picturing right now is an idiot talking into a can connected to a string because that is about as effective as the phone we bought.  Between the rain and the traffic, we could hear NOTHING. 

At this point, our mini umbrella (again I opted for the cheapest one available) was rendered useless.  We were drenched, disheartened and still lost.  After another half hour of wandering around, we found an open business and got some directions to the school.  It was over a mile up the road.  Consulting our trusty map, we noticed that there was a marker for this new location.  Unfortunately, it was listed as a different school for which we had an appointment on another day.

You can probably imagine how we looked when we finally made it to the school.  We were soaked to the bone.  Unfortunately for Carrie, she was wearing brand new jeans that had been washed at most once.  The result was that her legs were stained blue.  Nice.

The afternoon did end well, though.  The school was great.  We loved the teachers, the classrooms, basically the whole facility.  We had found Jacks new school.  Now all we need was a home.  More later…