We've had a fun week exploring our new surroundings! After we arrived on Sunday, our first mission was to check out a rental house that I had found on the internet. It was in the perfect location - only a block away from Emily's school, on the school bus route for Caitlin, and only a few blocks away from the hospital. Unfortunately, the house was not really that suitable - very very tiny bedrooms, and the stairs leading to the front door were a little bit dodgy too! Oh well....back to hunting out rentals....
Sunday night we were invited to a 'meet and greet' that the Human Resource manager had arranged for us. He had invited another nurse who had moved over from Scotland a few years earlier, plus another person from the hospital who had moved from British Colombia only a week ago. The other nurse had 2 children, both the same age as Emily and Caitlin! Emily hit it off with the daughter, who took great delight in telling Emily all about the high school and what she could expect etc. Unfortunately for Caitlin, she didn't really have much in common with their son, most likely because he was a boy, and boy's are ikky :)
The dinner was lovely, and it was good to meet some people, considering we know noone in this town! One thing we noticed however is that our tongue-in-cheek humour tends to mostly fall on deaf ears. During the evening, we would often make some witty remark to have it be taken very seriously, or be met with confused blank looks! After we left, we settled back into the hotel, managing to fall asleep some time around midnight - our bodies still slightly confused what time zone its currently in!
Monday we had planned to get stuck into the house hunting, look at cars, look at furniture, sort out schools, all before we met up with my new manager at 2pm. Reality - emily kindly woke me up AT 2pm to ask what she could have to eat! Jet lag had kicked in at last and we had slept the whole morning away! We frantically rushed to get dressed and out the door, finally getting to the hospital at 2.30pm. How embarrassing - so NOT the first impression I wanted to set when meeting my new boss!! We toured through the hospital, checked out where I would be working, and had a bit of a chat. First impression - the hospital is quite old and dated, but the staff are very friendly, and everyone is so keen to help each other. I even got a welcome pack to prepare me for my first day, and included was a card from the hospital CEO personally thanking me for travelling to the other side of the world to come and work for them!!! I thought that was pretty nice of them :)
Tuesday we had another invite for dinner, this time to the scottish nurse's house. She has a lovely home, just been built. HUGE!!! She apologised dinner was nothing special - but after living off takeouts for the past week, the meat pie, potatoes and veges were very yummy! We stayed a while chatting, the kids having fun playing with their dog, and finally managed to get away just as it started to snow! It was a very careful drive back to the hotel - talk about concentration! Pitch black in the middle of the night, trying to find my way back into town, remembering to stay on the right side of the road, remember all the odd road rules, AND cope with the snow too! oh, i should mention....when i say *snow*, a canadian would probably scoff and say it was nothing more than the occassional flurry, but we're new to all this, so we say snow!
Wednesday was back to the house hunting - this time we checked out a 2 bedroom apartment. I had been finding that 3 bedroom rentals are *very* hard to find, well, the good ones are! And I was getting concerned that we wouldn't be able to find something soon. My biggest worry (apart from the hotel bill!) was that I couldn't enrol Caitlin into school unless we knew where we would be living, so I knew what school she would be going to! Anyway, so we thought we'd check this 2 bedroom apartment out - I almost cancelled, thinking what was the point, the girls are not going to cope sharing a room. But we went....and wow. The place was awesome!! HUGE dining and living room, HUGE kitchen. The rooms were on either side of the living room and were quite spacious. The girls loved the place as much as I did. The people were in a hurry to move out as they had just purchased a home, so were looking for someone to take over their lease. Perfect - if we didn't like the place, we're not going to be locked into a long lease! So we went downstairs to meet with the landlord - approved me on the spot - we had a house! WOOHOO!!!
So the rest of the week was taken up with furniture hunting, buying supplies for the new place, car hunting, enrolling in schools. Before we knew it, it was Saturday and time to move into our new apartment. Thankfully the hotel manager was very understanding of the situation, and agreed to refund the extra nights i had paid for so we could check out early. We piled the car with all our belongings and made our way to our apartment! No more hotel living for us - and finally we can cook our own meals again!!!
No comments:
Post a Comment