The Family

WEATHER: getting warmer, sunny.

The Garrish Family consists of 4 members:

- Mom
- Dad
- Older Sister ~ referred to as G.
- Younger Sister ~ referred to as D.

But this is not the whole family. They are quite close to Mom's parents:

- Grandma'
- Grandpa'

And although Dad's parents live quite far away they see each other regularly:

- Nana
- Papa

Both Mom and Dad have several sisterts and brothers. Some of them I've already met, but I'll write about them later.

In the blog I'll use the words in italics for the family members.

And now briefly about the family members:

- Mom works in London for a big company which sells all sorts of designer clothes, shoes, bags... She is responsible for coordinating the online shopping of its website.

- Dad also works in London, for a carpet company as some kind of manager.

- G. is 13 years old, goes to secondary school in the neighbour town, Tenterden.

- D. is 9 years old, goes to the closest primary school in town, called Repton Manor Primary School.

"I'm going tow rite about school and education in detail as soon as understand the system."

- Grandma is 70, has so much energy you can't even imagine. She is originally Scottish, worked as a professional dancer in a theatre. She has lived in Africa for some years.

- Grandpa is also 70, is originally from Zimbabwe.

- Nana and Papa are both Welsh born and bred, still living there.

"About me managing with my English among these people I'm going to write later."

'Home'

WEATHER: hectic: sunny and 'warmish' in the morning, then suddenly very cold and windy in the afternoon, warm and less windy in the evening

(The weather might change easily because the air itself isn't really warm, but the sun shines very strongly when it shines and that makes the weather feel very warm. But when the sun goes down, it becomes quite cold again.)


The house where I live now looks like a typical English house, and I just love it for this!

The lounge, the kitchen, the dining room and a study are on the ground floor. The children's rooms and my room are located on the first floor, and the parents' bedroom is on the third floor. Behind the house there is a quite big garden.

I'm very lucky with my accomodation. I have my own separate room and not only this but also a bathroom on my own. In general, most of the au-pairs have the their own room, but usually they have to share the bathroom with the children.

The room:

The bathroom:

And yes, you see it correctly! There are separate cold and hot taps! Why? Still no answer. It is not practical at all. I solve the difficulty in a way that I don't use the hot tap. The water coming from it is just too hot. In the kitchen and in the shower there is (fortunately) a mixed water tap.

About Ashford

WEATHER: colder, under 20 °C, windy in the morning, warmer but still windy in the afternoon

The town where I live in England is Ashford. Ashford is situated in the county Kent on the Southeast.

Ashford - London: 58 miles ~ 93 km
Ashford - Canterbury: 15 miles ~ 24 km
Ashford - Dover: 22 miles ~ 35 km

Ashford is an old town but not a historical one. It has a population of about 74,000. Of course it has a typical old church:

And a very narrow and village-like town centre:

But nowadays the town is mostly famous for two other things. Firstly, it has an international railways station, called Ashford International. Besides the domestic trains, there is a station of the famous international London-Paris train.

"I'm going to write about the railway system in a later post."

The other important thing in Ashford is the Designer Outlet. It is a big shopping centre where most of the big designer brands are present and sell their products with a high discount.

"As soon as I go there I'll write about it."

The day of travelling

WEATHER: warm, sunny, above 25 °C, windy

The day of the travelling came after three days of packing. My plane took off at the Vienna Airport on 10th June, on Saturday at 12:00. I brought with me two suitcases as I needed lots of space for clothes varying from pullovers till tank tops.

Honestly, I hoped I could leave without crying, but, of course, I couldn't. There was some crying when leaving home, and then some more at the airport, and then some more on the plane. But I came, here I am, and since then wasn't any crying.

My host family was waiting for me at the exit at the airport.

"In the next post I am going to write about Ashford."

About the blog

I have a detailed plan about this blog, but I can't promise that I will always follow my own ideas.

My plan is to write a short summary about my stay regularly. (I know it now that this won't easy for me, but at least I'll try.)

Every post will have two essential parts: WEATHER and NEW ENGLISH. I want to keep track of the weather during my staying, and it might be interesting for you, too. (Plus, English really do talk a lot about the weather.) In the new English section I'll try to make notes about vocabulary, grammar, pronunciation that I learn, hear, see, read...

Besides these two elements, most of the posts should contain the summary of a CERTAIN TOPIC, like food, school, school uniform, family life, home town, travellings etc, completed by lots of PHOTOS.

I plan to write this blog in English, however, in some cases it might happen that it'll be written in Hungarian

I hope, you'll enjoy it! (And that I'll manage to keep you updated :) )

First thoughts

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."