Finding a Family

So you're looking for a host family in Paris. There are three main ways to find one: The internet, word of mouth, and agencies. Bear in mind how you do eventually find your host family, as this can reveal a lot about their attitude towards their au pairs. For anyone who's interested, I found my first family through Au Pair World, and my second through Great Au Pair, but have found extra babysitting and tutoring work through Craigslist, the American Church of Paris, and word of mouth.

The Internet

If you're European, the most popular site to match au pairs with families is Au Pair World. This should be your go-to to begin looking, as you can create a quick and easy profile, enter the criteria you're looking for in a family, and quickly start talking to lots of families. It's very convenient, and free for au pairs to use. Bonzer. However, this does have its drawbacks: it's pretty cheap for host families to use (thereby attracting more stingy families) and so the jobs advertised on here are usually (but not always) on the lower end of the pay scale, around 80 Euros per week (minimum wage), or lower if your family are idiots. Don't take a job which is paid less than 80 a week EVER. Warning sign number 1. If you do, you set a precedent for your host family to consistently undervalue you, which is a rubbish position to be in, especially if you're living with them. The reason I mention being European is because the majority of families on this site are looking for EU nationals, because this means a lot less paperwork and hassle for them (or no paperwork at all, if they expect their au pair to live and work without being declared to the government. Warning sign number 2). Also, the shorter the amount of time a host family activates their account for, the less they have to pay. If the host family you're talking to want to switch to communicating via email or whatever, this is fine: it's a faff to communicate through Au Pair World's messaging system. But if they want to switch to email because they're deactivating their account, or they pressure you to commit to working for them very quickly so they can close their account quicker, thus saving money, this is warning sign number 3. Stingy bastards alert. 

Another good site is Great Au Pair. You create a more extensive profile with this one and the website is less convenient to use. Membership is more expensive, and paid membership is also offered to au pairs. This is good and bad: being an expensive and detailed service means the website attracts higher-paying families, and families who have a more rigorous selection process for au pairs. This is a good thing as you'll be in safer hands with a family who have experience with au pairs and are clear about what they expect from you. Hearing "we like our au pairs to be flexible!" and "we're new to this au pairing business so we'll have to figure it out as we go!" = warning sign number 4. That being said, if you choose not to pay for a membership to the site, you'll be able to view the high-paying jobs,but not contact the families beyond 'adding them as a favourite', which can be very frustrating as you have to wait/hope that they will contact you first. I was very lucky that this happened to me, but don't expect it to happen. Families on Great Au Pair tend to be more receptive to people from outside the EU than on Au Pair World, but there are a lot fewer jobs advertised on Great Au Pair as it isn't as popular.

The third possible way of finding a family online is through Facebook. Groups such as Au Pair in Paris, Au Pair Paris 2014-15, and Au Pair Paris Exchange and Meetup will often have advertisements for jobs from current au pairs leaving their families. This is good as you can speak to the au pair personally and ask her about her experience, but beware! Some girls may be leaving because their host family is not a good one, and they need to find their own replacements, leading you into something of a trap. This method is good for last minute job offers though: if you have little notice to find a host family try this route. If she's vague on the details about why she's leaving = warning sign number 5. There are also a lot of spammers posting fake adverts, so look out for poorly written/illogical English, phrases like "God-Fearing", excessive capitalisation, or anything which really sounds too good to be true. Also bear in mind what it might mean for the family's au pair to be finding her replacement, rather than the family directly: either they have a great relationship and trust their au pair with this important task, or they're too lazy to find their own au pair. Try and figure out which one it is and you'll get a sense of what the family are like.

Adverts for au pairing jobs are also sometimes placed on Craigslist. I have found babysitting work through this website, but there's not much I can say about it, as you just respond to an advert and begin emailing the employer, it's not a website specifically dedicated to au pairing. I don't know any au pairs who found their jobs on Craigslist. 

Agencies

There are benefits and drawbacks to working with an agency. They will perform background checks on host families so it's the safest option, will help you with your paperwork (this can be a lifesaver if you're coming from outside the EU and have difficulty handling it all), and will often help you with settling in, maybe meeting you at the airport or throwing icebreakers for their clients. Many of my friends who have used agencies have found it to be a great experience, and I've heard good things especially about Au Pair Paris, as it's a smaller agency and can give you lots of personal attention. Also, if you work with an agency you are guaranteed to make minimum wage, and to be living and working legally in the country. That being said, I would personally not use an agency (although I am from the UK so can't really empathise with US paperwork!). Agencies match you with host families, effectively taking your autonomy away. Maybe it's just my own vanity at being a "free agent", but I wouldn't feel comfortable with not choosing the family I was going to live with/work for for a year myself. Also, agencies can be very expensive. Finally, they are being paid not only by you, but by the host families as well, meaning that in the case of conflict their allegiance does not solely lie with you. Some au pairs I know have come under a lot of pressure from their agencies if they want to change families or stop au pairing altogether, because it's viewed as a failure on the au pair's part to integrate, rather than having an unfair family, and it also makes the agency look bad. If'm sure this can be true in some, but not all, cases, and I know if I were stuck in a situation I wanted to leave, it would be bad enough to be given grief by my host family, without getting it from an agency as well.

Word of Mouth

If there's one thing I've learned as an au pair, it's that you have to network, network, network. Hypothetical scenario: you need to find a job at short notice because your host family refuse to pay you. You remember that you met a girl at a party a few weeks ago, who said that a parent from her childrens' school was thinking of hiring an au pair. If you just went back to your friends, and didn't make an effort to get chatting to her, you have no way of finding out if the job's still available, or getting a recommendation, and you are well and truly on your own. But if you established a rapport with this girl and got her details, fabulous! She can recommend you, give you contact details, and the job's a good'un. This is the power that networking can have! It's so important to build up a community once you arrive for anything that you may need. Obviously, this applies far more to au pairs already in Paris, who are looking for new jobs, but you can see my point. Other au pairs, parents at the school gates, people you meet on nights out, even people you get chatting to on the metro - you never know when you'll need that contact. 

Another option for girls already in Paris is the American Church in Paris. The church is a hub for the English-speaking community in Paris, so if you're an EMT (English mother tongue) au pair, or speak fluent English, you'll find vacancies looking for someone with your skills. They have a noticeboard in their central courtyard where adverts are placed each morning at 10AM. Get there on time and start making those calls, you can be on to a winner. This is great for last minute jobs or part time work. There are also adverts for housing, tutoring, events, and other various things, if this is what you're looking for.

Is Au Pairing For You?

So the first question is: do you actually want to be an au pair? The reality is, the majority of us didn't. Spending 25-30 hours a week running around after children isn't exactly the glamorous Parisian life you had envisaged. That being said, everyone who has been an au pair has found it to be a rewarding experience in at least some ways.

The absolute first step is to refer to this amazing post by Left Bank Manc. I read it before I arrived, over half of my friends read it before they arrived, it's the most useful post you could read on the subject. Ignore its advice at your own peril. In terms of pre-arrival reading material, stick to genuine au pair testimonials. Amazon might try to make you think you need a 200 page book on becoming an au pair, but the authors have sales targets and editors to keep happy, while current and former au pairs are chatting/blogging away for the collective good (and are a lot more truthful anyway!).

There are the obvious benefits: a cheap and easy way to live in Paris (and pretty much the only way open to an 18 year old girl with no second language, degree or work experience), learning a new language, and having a host family around as a safety net (provided they're not psychos) when you're living alone and abroad for the first time.

But the truth is, there are many more benefits to this unglamorous position. Aside from the day-to-day factors, au pairing is a genuinely character-building experience. I know it sounds vom-inducing but hear me out. For me, the biggest change has been my increase in confidence. When you're at home, living with your parents and worrying about your exam grades, it's easy to put yourself down. But when you're in a strange country on your own, trying to learn a new language and working hard, you can see your own achievements and feel proud of yourself for going it alone. Bonus points if you're working a rubbish job. This was my reality, and I found that being able to see (and resent) the way I was being undervalued and underappreciated forced me to realise what my own contribution and worth were. Boom. Instant confidence.

Negotiation is another key skill that you learn. When you're working for someone, you can't just throw a strop when things aren't going your way (or even if your boss is a complete idiot). You have to be diplomatic in your approach to problem solving, or you'll find yourself out on the street. With the newfound confidence mentioned above, you'll want to get the best deal you possibly can for yourself, and how do you do it? Negotiation. 

The third benefit is your increase in patience. Surprisingly, spending 30 hours a week looking after foreign children, communicating in a different language, dealing with frustrating situations from your host family or with paperwork, and being away from home, is not easy! The number of times you have to just hold your nerve, count to ten, and tell yourself it will all be okay, is staggering. And you will find yourself a better, more mature person for dealing with all of it. In the future I won't resort to ugly crying or storming off when I'm stressed - I'll just take a deep breath, eat a macaron and remember a time when it was so much worse. I'm kidding, but you will become less stressy.

So are you cut out for being an au pair?  The answer is, probably, yes. The only people I would warn off au pairing are self-centred people who want to stay that way. You can't be a selfish au pair. Most of your time is devoted to looking after other people, and if you just want to focus on yourself, find a different job.

You might not have much experience with kids, cooking, or cleaning, but the fact is, au pairing is not going to be 'The Sound of Music', and your host family won't be expecting Julie Andrews. You learn on the job, plain and simple, and within two weeks you'll know almost everything you need to. And even if you don't like children, and the children you watch are little nightmares, you will be surprised at how much you end up liking, or at least tolerating, them. And just how restorative a collective bitching session with other au pairs over a bottle of one-euro wine can be. Basically, you will cope, and the possibilities of being in Paris for a year are endless.

Moving on up, and eating bad food

Salut from Paris! Or, more accurately, from my sofa at home in Coventry. Technical issues prevented me from uploading content for the past two weeks, so I'm publishing my backlog now while I'm visiting home.

The past fortnight has been a bit of a blur really. I've started, completed and sent my UCAS application for next year (all in the space of a day, just before the deadline...do not follow this example!!), moved to a new job and a new apartment (more on this later), and returned to England, as well as the standard combination of work and language school. Très fatigant!

Last week, I visited a lovely area of Paris which I've never been to before, Saint-Germain-des-Prés. After a pleasant stroll around Jean-Paul-Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir's former stomping ground (mysteriously titled Place Sartre-Beauvoir) and a visit to the titular abbey of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, founded in the 5th century and rebuilt in the 11th, and site of Descartes' tomb, we stopped for a café crème at an adorable café called Le Bonaparte. Yes, Les Deux Magots may be the obvious choice in that area, but it had Napoleon's name in the title so I couldn't say no.

This week marked my first visit to a French restaurant (sort of). I'm now living in the Latin Quarter (the historic/student area) as opposed to the 15th arrondissement (in the expensive environs of the Eiffel Tower). Apart from the fact that it's my favourite area in Paris, there are actually affordable things there, so it's a win-win! Or so I thought. Giddy with the sense of possibility at the number of eateries close by with €15 and €10 three-course set menus, I visited a French restaurant with a friend from language school, and quickly found out two things: 1) If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is, 2) You get what you pay for. The ambience (and price) of the resaurant were lovely, the food not so much. Between us, we had a "vegetarian" starter which turned out to be very non-vegetarian indeed, some tasteless soup a l'oignon, a dish of skate drenched in mustard with a gag-inducing texture, boeuf bourguignon with lumps of charred, rock solid beef, and surprisingly redeeming crème caramel and tarte aux pommes. We basically paid and bolted.

Picture this sort of thing on the inside, although of course I forgot my camera again. 

 Fine dining apart, the Latin Quarter is the bomb for food. The 15th was more "€20 brunch" than "€2 crêpe when you're drunk at 1AM". There are restaurants of every nationality, and within a 5 minute walk of where I live, there's a Monoprix, a McDonalds, and an M+S Food, so it's perfect for an uncultured swine like myself.

So. Many. Stolen. Photos.

Also this week, I visited Cinema L'Arlequin, to watch National Gallery, a documentary about the National Gallery (surprisingly). Pros: I learned a lot, the cinema was lovely (it's famous for its screenings of Soviet-era films!), and I smuggled in a bottle of wine. Cons: The documentary was 3 hours long, and it felt like it. I've never left the cinema at midnight before, and I don't intend to again. Also it was in English , so if anything, I understood too much!

Of course, the biggest event has been moving jobs and apartments this week. After a hellish journey in which my suitcase gave up and broke, I'm now in my very own tiny Parisian studio in the 5th arrondissement, in a building from the 1600s. Yes, it lacks central heating, double glazing and decent fire escapes, and the number of insects I've seen is horrifying (they live in the wooden beams and thrive on the humidity), but it's perfect to me. Everything is so efficiently compact, I have a little café table in my kitchen/living room where I can sit by the window and drink coffee brewed in my cafetière, and a window box for planting flowers in the spring. I'm living the Parisian dream, or rather, I will be once I return to Paris and attack the entire apartment with bleach.

Petit Palais

 

 

In a bid to salvage my decidedly mundane week, I hit the Petit Palais on the way home. I have yet to visit its big sister, the Grand Palais (judging by the queue and number of police cars lined up outside it on this particular day, I think I made the right choice), but this museum, built for the 1900 World's Fair, is one of my favourite buildings in Paris. I love the portraits of Parisian women best of all - in the mid-nineteenth century, it's hard to imagine an English woman willingly being painted in her boudoir, much less in shimmery silk with a flirtatious twinkle in her eye, and yet in France, somehow, it just seems logical.

"Why Paris ruins you for life"

http://www.buzzfeed.com/jenniferschaffer/paris-je-taime#396xt1o

Although I disagree with number 10. The smell of Paris after rain ain't nothin' but urine.

"De quoi va t-on parler?"

This week was like all my other Parisian weeks: full of fast cars and faster women. I joke (obviously). But this week was intense! I started at language school, and it became very evident very quickly just how rusty my French had become since I last studied it, over a year ago. Because of the many different nationalities in the classes (in my class, there are Swedish, Italian, Moroccan, Mexican, Spanish, Ukrainian, American, Canadian, German, Austrian and Korean students!) they are taught only in French, which can be a little draining in a two-and-a-half-hour class, and a little confusing when you come across words you don't know and get French explanations of them, rather than English translations. That being said, my French has improved more in the past week than in my first month here, so I must be doing something right!

Me trying to take notes and listen to the teacher at the same time

On Thursday I visited the Musée Maillol for the exhibition 'Les Borgia et leur temps'. It was a great exhibition about the Borgias themselves, their political and social context, and the art they sponsored. Had it not all been in French, I probably would have understood more, but as it was I still learned a lot and saw some unmissable items, such as an early edition of 'The Prince' and an original portrait of Machiavelli, letters signed by Leonardo da Vinci, and some of Michelangelo's sketches for the Sistine Chapel.  There was also a lot of information on the Renaissance, and I was unsurprised to see that England didn't feature highly in the discussion. Everything we were taught about the insignificance of our isle in AS History was true! Awkward moments followed as I found myself  in the modern art wing of the museum. The security guard was watching me so I had to walk around looking like I understood the paintings while actually having no idea what they meant. It made me wonder if that's what everyone does in modern art galleries...

A typically brilliant photo

Friday night was certainly an experience. I went to the beautiful and famous La Pagode cinema to see my first French film since arriving here. It was called 'Elle L'Adore' and was apparently a comedy. My major success of the evening was smuggling a bottle of wine into the cinema, as my understanding of the plot and dialogue was rather limited. Regardless, the cinema was gorgeous, especially the 'salle japonaise' and oriental garden. Hopefully it's the first of many independent cinema trips this year, although I hope to understand more of my next film!

Yeah...I forgot to take photos. 

Saturday presented the first meeting of my French conversation group. After getting lost in Chatelet metro station/shopping centre/black hole for the umpteenth time, I met up with a few other au pairs to practice my French, starting with coffee and extending to a picnic in Place des Vosges, the oldest planned square in Paris in the historic Marais quarter. The sun was out (for most likely the last day of nice weather this year, sob), and I had a baguette, brie, and good company, so a nice afternoon was had by all.

What it may have looked like, had I had my camera.

Saturday night was La Nuit Blanche, the city-wide all-night arts festival  that had been creating buzz all week. Being the artistic, trendy youth I am, I went to bed instead. How bourgeois.