Relearning to Drive in the UK

At last, we are settling into a bit of a routine here. Looking back at the last two weeks, I realize that we made this a bit more difficult for ourselves by timing our arrival a week too close to the arrival of our students. Had we given ourselves an extra week to get the kids settled in their schools, and to get Leah used to her nursery school (if that ever actually happens…), I think this would have gone more smoothly. It doesn’t help that we weren’t able to move right in, or that I got a terrible cold, but none of that matters now. It is what it is, and we’ll just chalk it up to a lesson learned if we are ever able to do this again.

Nonetheless, I think we are finally feeling more settled. My day starts at 6:00 am, and I’m not sure what happens in the first ten minutes of it, but by 6:10 am I am conscious and drinking a cup of coffee, so that’s what counts.  I turn on the BBC to catch the weather (I’m so happy to see that the weather presenter called Carol is still around, with her cheerful “here too, we’ll see some spots of brightening…” predictions). Ideally I would then leave the house for a morning run, but it’s still so dark and I have been so sick that this hasn’t happened yet. Some days, I make do with a Jillian Michaels DVD set I brought along (though I can’t really stand her) and other days I just keep drinking coffee until the kids wake up. They get up around 7:30 am, and since they are wearing uniforms they are able to get dressed very quickly. They come down without their ties tied because they are still learning how to do that, but otherwise the uniform comes together with no problem. We eat breakfast together, and though in the first week we were experimenting with some more traditional British options like porridge, we are back to our standby of scrambled eggs and toast. 

John and Leah and I leave the house at 8:30 in the car, and Emma and David leave by foot a few minutes after us. I drop John off at his school at 8:35, and once he gets out of the car Leah realizes that she is going to school as well and so she starts to cry. It’s about a 10 minute drive to her nursery from there, and since she alternates between loud sobs and shouts of “I don’t WANT to go to my new shool!” the whole way, that ten minutes is certainly a lowlight of each day. Fortunately, the teachers there are masters at gathering up kids in full tears and ushering them into some kind of planned activity, so at least I don’t have to navigate the whole peeling-the-child-off-the-leg scenario each morning. As I wave goodbye, she is still always sobbing but is starting to look around at what the other kids are doing, so I’m counting it as a very, very small victory. Of course, it does stress me out and so every morning, in front of all the other parents dropping their children off, I get into the car on the wrong side. They do all know me as the new mum from New York, so I don’t think they find it THAT strange. However, I will know when Leah is truly happy at this new school when I finally manage to get that part of the morning right!

The mini roundabout!

All of this driving each morning is giving me a chance to really observe the rules of the road, and learn a bit more about how one should navigate here. I still find the roundabouts a bit puzzling, though it’s the mini-roundabouts that really cause me trouble. These are nothing more than small white “reflectorized” bumps in the middle of the road, where Americans might place a stop sign. Like all roundabouts,  the general principle of yielding to anyone to your right applies here. Here’s the problem, though: if I am approaching one of these and I intend to go straight, and an oncoming car approaching the roundabout from the opposite direction is signaling that he wants to turn right (in front of me), is he to my right? Should I stop and yield to him? If I do, it feels the same as it would feel in the U.S. if someone stopped in the middle of the road to allow someone to make a left-hand turn in front of them. Another issue here is that, if I do stop to allow someone to make a right in front of me and there is someone to my left waiting to yield to me as I am on their right, then they get held up as well. I actually googled this last night to see if I could figure out what the right approach is, but all I came up with were a series of chat room posts made by British people complaining that no one knows how to deal with these…British or not!

The dreaded double-mini-roundabout!

If this were not bad enough, there is one intersection in St. Andrews that consists of a double mini-roundabout! It’s a main intersection between John’s school and one of the roads that I might take to get to Leah’s nursery school, and the first time I came upon it I was completely confused and had no idea whatsoever to do there. I think the idea is to treat each roundabout as a separate thing, but there’s really not very much space in between to figure this out. It’s compounded by the fact that there’s a lot of traffic coming into town at that time in the morning, and I am trying to leave town. When I enter the double roundabout, I am on the right of everyone coming into town, and so an entire queue of rapidly-moving traffic comes to a halt to make way for me. It’s one thing to proceed through a confusing intersection when you are unsure of what you are doing, and it’s another thing to do it with a large audience! Fortunately, yesterday, I managed to work my way through a nearby neighborhood near John’s school so as to come out just past that intersection, meaning that for the time being I can avoid it until I feel more comfortable.