As lots of you may know, I'm spending this summer in England as an au-pair.
The first question might arises: Why? Because of lots of reasons. Although, I love summers at home, spending time with family and get some rest from the university rush, I decided in January 2017 that I would be very adventurous (maybe a little bit crazy, too) and do something completely foreign. I wanted to live abroad for the summer.
So far so good. But which country to choose? Several options came to my mind, like Austria, Germany, UK or the USA (of course connected to my studies). Choosing from these contries wasn't really difficult. As my dear classmates at university can prove as well, I (and maybe I can say 'we') was so fed up with the German part of my studies that I excluded Austria and Germany very quickly. The USA seemed a bit too far from home, so UK or especially England remained the last option, which I don't mind at all. (To be honest, from the very beginning this was the choice of my heart.) So England it is.
The next question: What to do there? And how? Compared to myself, I had to be really brave to leave home for the summer in the first place, so I definitely had to look for something to do there which is not too much out of my comfort zone. Then came the idea of becoming an au-pair.
Thanks to one of my university classmates (who is an experienced summer au-pair) I found a
website called
https://www.aupairworld.com/en . I registered there, wrote my profile and the family hunting began. There are several websites like this out there which work quite similarly. Possible au-pairs and possible host families register, write their profiles and start looking for each other. When you read the profile, look at the photos and you like one, you send them a short message saying you like their profile and would love to have further discussion about the job. This works both ways, so both au-pairs and host families can start the discussion.
Of course, there are much more au-pairs
applying for the job than families offering it, so it's not easy at all to find the suitable family. I personally received about 4 messages from families and sent about 18 applications to families before I found the one I'm staying with. I had a few restrictions of my own, like I wanted to live with a family with no more than 3 children, children under 14, with not a lot of (and big) animals, I didn't want to live in a big city and in a flat, and, of course, I needed a family who didn't want me to drive the kids, because, obviously, I wouldn't be able to do that in the UK in the left-hand traffic. And, of course, because I want to continue my studies in September, I needed a family who were looking for an au-pair only for the summer. So, these are quite a few restrictions which didn't help my case, but I was lucky enough to find a suitable family in about 2 months of searching.
"I'm going to introduce the family in a later post."
What does an au-pair do?
An
au-pair is an unmarried young adult aged 18 to 30 years, who has no children and travels to a foreign country for a defined period of time to live with a host family. The au-pair is considered as a full member of the family during the entire stay. As such, he or she helps the family with childcare and can be asked to assume some light household tasks. In return, the host family provides free board and lodging, as well as pocket money. However, the au-pair is neither a housekeeper, nor a nanny.
source: https://www.aupairworld.com/en/au_pair/au_pair
"I'm going to write about my duties in a later post."
