My job is how I spend most of my time, it's the thing that allows me to be here, and it's also what I'll write about least. Professionalism, guys! But yes, I am an au pair. I moved in to this apartment with a family I had never met and now look after their children on a daily basis. I bet all of my friends at Fresher's Week are so jealous right now. But, I have a lot of free time to explore the city and the opportunity (not always taken up) of practicing my French, so it works for me. If however you simply must know the gory details of the au pair lifestyle, look up any website with the words "au pair" and "confession" in its title. I'm not saying it's all relatable, but I'm not saying it isn't either.
So far my life here has had its ups and downs. Homesickness is something we all pretend we're too cool for, and it only tends to come when you move to a different country at 18 for a long period of time! But, almost two weeks in, I can't imagine spending this year anywhere else. The great thing about being an au pair here is that you have an instant community to rely on. Only here can I text someone I've never met before saying "Yeah, let's do coffee/drinks/museums!" and as such, I've made loads of new friends already. Living on an au pair's salary means that my social life is more 1 Euro wine from Carrefour than Moet, but it's just as fun, especially as the weather here has been gorgeous and sunny every day. So far, I have convened with hundreds of au pairs for a picnic, been for Rosé Seine-side with 9 crazy single ladies, eaten falafel in Le Marais with a Floridian sorority girl, been to happy hour with a gang of Germans speaking a mixture of German and French, treated food shopping as a social outing with a Spanish au pair, and discovered the ins and outs of French Tinder (hey, I'm not proud of all of this!) Of course, cameras are too touristic and bourgeois for us cosmopolitan Parisians, so few pictures of my exploits exist thus far. I intend to remedy this from now on but forgive me!
As packed as my social calendar has been, I've actually been spending most of my time alone. The children go to school five minutes from Palais de Chaillot, so most mornings I'll sit there and read for an hour as the sun comes up over the Paris skyline. It's a tough job, but someone has to do it!
(this picture is completely cheating, as it's from ages ago, but it's the same place)
So far my cultural education has been limited. My aspirations for museums aplenty, arthouse cinemas and French cuisine have been somewhat dashed due to the abundance of paperwork I'm dealing with at the moment, but it will all come in good time. For a flavour of my agenda, there was: a new bank account, a french mobile account, a metro card account, signing up to language school, taking tests at language school, getting textbooks for language school, all of which seem to require a passport photo, your life story, and the promise of your first-born child, in triplicate. The French government sure are demanding, and on occasion I have been found to mutter "a bloody revolution, for this?!" to myself when confronted with the latest bureacratic obstacle. I'm still searching for liberté, not from royal authority but from paperwork.
Napoleon wouldn't have put up with this.
That being said, I have managed to fit in a trip to the Petit Palais, and to Montmartre, as well as just about every bridge going (they're the ideal locations to split a bottle of Carrefour's finest with friends on Friday night!) so in time I should cease to be the uncultured swine I currently am. Onwards and upwards!
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