I finally made it over to the medical school late this morning. Gloria didn’t have any papers for me to sign, but said there would be some ready for me on Monday. José, the guy who is hiring me, should be in on Monday too. He was out of town this week. Gloria tried to give me some help with finding a school and apartment, but didn’t have much to tell me that I didn’t already know. Basically it just comes down to Robin and I doing the necessary research and making some decisions. I picked up two faxes and a letter sent to me care of José by some preschools. Including three emails I received that makes six responses from forty letters I sent to schools. Better than nothing I guess.

I also spoke with Sean, the guy I’ll be working most closely with and who will nominally be my supervisor. He was rather stressed out because he is supposed to start teaching on Tuesday but isn’t yet prepared. He’s been provided with a textbook and Powerpoint sildes for the class he’s supposed to teach, but everything is in Spanish and he doesn’t speak Spanish. He can teach the course in English, since all the medical students are supposed to have mastered it, but the Spanish textbook and slides aren’t much use to him if he can’t read them. It looked like an introductory course in molecular biology or genetics from what I saw of the Powerpoint slides. Lani, one of the medical students, was supposed to help him translate next week’s slides into English today. I volunteered to help out with subsequent translations if necessary. He also mentioned that he’d be gone the third week of August and might need me to cover for him. So I may end up doing a couple of lectures.

I made some calls to a few schools today but didn’t make a lot of progress towards finding one. I learned that Instituto Versalles in Obispado is primarily Spanish, with one hour of English and one hour of Mandarin per day. Worth a visit I suppose. Centro Educativo Allegro in Del Valle is primarily Spanish, but the director was out and won’t be back until Tuesday. FORMUS in Valle del Contry is apparently full but I was invited to fill out an application online.

We drove by Allegro and one other school in Del Valle late in the afternoon, just to see what they looked like from the outside, and so we could have a look at Del Valle. Del Valle is supposedly the really posh part of Monterrey where all the rich families live. I found it nice enough, but surprisingly unimpressive. Sure, there were some nice big houses, but they were all stacked cheek by jowl. Nobody had any front or side yards at all. And there were occasional apartment buildings mixed in with the houses, something you’d never see in the neighborhoods of the wealthy in the U.S. I guess from the way people talk about it I was expecting something really upscale and exclusive like Beverly Hills, but it’s nothing like that. Which works to our advantage if we choose a school there, because we might get lucky and find an affordable small apartment nearby.

We also bought Mexican cell phones today. We went with Telcel and got a plan where we can make calls of five minutes or less to each other for free as long as we are in Monterrey. Longer calls or other local calls are billed at 40 cents per minute, so we won’t be using the cell phones for much besides calling each other to check in. But eventually we’ll have a landline for other calls. The phones we have now are the prepaid kind, which was really the only kind we could buy without having a permanent address, bank account, etc. Once we are more established here we may be able to convert to a monthly service contract with better terms. These phones will do for now though. The important thing is that we can contact each other when we need to without breaking the bank.

I’m not looking forward to searching for a school and an apartment with Enid in tow. She is a really good kid, but sitting quietly for lengthy periods while Robin and I try to muddle our way through business negotiations in broken Spanish is really not something she’s capable of at her age. I think one of us will have to do the talking while the other keeps her occupied as we take care of business. Which is not ideal because all the decisions are ones we need to make jointly, but without anyone else here to look after Enid we have no other choice.

Tomorrow being Saturday we won’t be able to work on the school search again until Monday. Probably a good thing since we’ll have a chance to give Enid some undivided attention for a while. We’ll probably also take advantage of the lighter weekend traffic to visit some neighborhoods and try to narrow down where we want to search for schools.