My previous blog posts may have given you the impression that I am enjoying living in France. Your impression is wrong. I hate it here. Nice little trip? Yes. Work here for a year? Definitely not! Don't get me wrong, Toulouse is a lovely city and I love the fact that everytime I post something on Facebook it says sent from Toulouse, France. However, I HATE my job!
I just really do. There's not actually a lot more to say on the case other than I hate it. Well, actually there's a lot more. I live in a squat, basically. I have a mattress on the floor. We have no oven. We have no washing machine. I have to hold the shower above my head in the grottiest bath known to man. We live on the 4th fucking floor with no fucking lift. In my other post I was chatting as if that was all perfectly acceptable, but it is NOT! You don't get an au pair when you can't even offer her a fucking bed! Am I being unreasonable?
And when I arrived I got told that I cook for the kids and the Mum will cook for us later on but if I fancied cooking for them too I could. After all this was my home and I could treat it as my home. Sounds reasonable enough, right? Well let me tell you that yesterday I made some friends :) I'll tell you all about that when I'm not hating my life massively. Could be a while as I don't think I'll ever be happy in this shit hole. Anyway my new friend needed the toilet, and I live right in the centre. If I was at home, and by home I mean England, with Mummy, and we were passing my house I would happily let my friend in to use the toilet. No harm done. So I let my friend in, she quickly used the toilet. Didn't touch anything said a quick hello to the Great Grandma who was there and left quickly. This to me is a perfectly acceptable thing to do. I even supervised her to and from the toilet. (Not whilst she was on the toilet as that would've been weird, and she couldn't have possibly stolen anything from in there as it is literally just a toilet and the cats' litter tray. It's not one of these fancy bathrooms with a sink and posh soap to steal.) Anyway this morning, on my day off, the Mum woke me up at 9 to tell me that she doesn't like people they don't know in the house (squat) when they're not there. I apologised and decided this was fair enough. However, after having a day to think about this and discussing it with my friends, I think this is fairly out of order. So I can treat the house like my home when it comes to them leaving me a bowl of washing up or me cooking for them, but when I want to let a friend use the toilet this isn't allowed. It's not really my 'home' then is it?
I started writing all this yesterday when I was in the worst mood in the world. Anyway I've cheered up a bit now and I'll tell you for why...
So after all of this I decided to repost my profile on au pair world. I was also looking at old applications I had had that I hadn't bothered to delete. (For those of you that don't know, once you end the conversation you can't talk to that family again). So anyway there was a few families that I liked the look of but I assumed that most of them had already found au pairs by now and had just not bothered to deactivate their profiles. Anyway there was one family that had contacted me before from Paris but I'd already chosen this family. However they were offering me a car, a mobile a NAVIGO pass (Oyster card type thing) and other stuff all paid for. So I hadn't ever ended the conversation with them as I said that I may be interested next year. This morning I wrote them a quick message saying that they probably have already found an au pair but if they were still looking I wasn't entirely happy in my family. I said that it wasn't the fault of the family, and it isn't. I don't feel I have the experience required to look after toddlers and to be fair it would benefit the family to get someone who did. The children in the new family are older, two girls who are 11 and 9 and a 5 year old boy. To be fair I knew what I was signing up for when I came, there were no nasty surprises (I suppose a bed would've been nice but you can't win them all!) but I suppose I was a bit naive and didn't properly think about it. I probably unintentionally let on that I had more experience than I did and we both took a risk. It obviously didn't pay off.
So anyway, I got a reply from this family an hour or two later saying that their au pair left yesterday as she was incredibly homesick so they were now looking for someone new. Now, I'm not a massive believer in fate and all that shit, but surely, if anything is fate- this is!! They said they are happy to wait for me until my current family have found a new au pair and I'm so so so happy!
But, now I have to break the news to my current family! Which I'm really not looking forward to! But I think we can make it fairly amicable. I'll do the whole it's not you, it's me thing. Which to be fair it is. They're a lovely family but I just cannot handle the job. I just hope they understand!
I'll emailed the entire situation to my Mum and all I really want is a quick message saying 'Just go for it. Do what makes you happy.' However, more than likely I'll get a ridiculously long email saying that I should stick it out for a bit longer. But I don't want to. The longer I stay, the harder it'll be to go. Not just for me but also for the children. More than likely though, I won't get a reply at all. We have shit internet at home so Mum won't see the email until she's at work tomorrow and I'm planning on talking to them tonight. At least like this she hasn't said don't do it!
But I tweeted my Dad, Skyped my friend and emailed another and they all think it's a good idea, so I'll just have to take their words for it! A friend* I've made over here said that she told her host parents my situation and they said that if I'm not happy I should go. I'm not happy, so I'm going.
*I have made some friends :) Which does make the whole leaving thing slightly difficult but I'll do another blog about them because this one's getting quite long and varied.
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