On my road into the wild

Now don’t get me wrong. I don’t plan on spending months On the Road on my way Into the Wild where I’ll find my end way too soon. But after jumping through enough hoops to qualify for the next Olympics, now seems like the right time to just lean back and start daydreaming about traveling. And that’s exactly what I’ve been doing when I’m feeling blue…

In fact, daydreaming has been the major reason for procrastination recently (salute to Michelle). To jumpstart my imagination I got a brand new Lonely Planet travel guide. I have to admit that I have used these travel guides for a couple of years now so bear with me if you’re not a fan. The first chapter I usually have a look at is “Getting Started”. There I found probably the most important advice for my trip, especially concerning packing, namely

after you halve your clothes, double your estimated budget, and it’ll work out fine.

Not sure yet how the doubling of my budget will work without committing a crime, but I’ll definitely (try to) stick to the second part of that advice. If you have ever been in the same situation you might remember the dilemma of suddenly having to chose between your favorite and the most practical outfit. Since the whole packing issue is still quite frustrating, I did the psychologically healthiest thing of repressing the issue and putting it off.

I continued to just browse through my travel guide some more when I came across Jack Kerouac again. So I looked for my copy of On the Road and found the passage that I consider essential – for Sal in the story and my story, too.

What’s your road, man? – holyboy road, madman road, rainbow road, guppy road, any road. It’s an anywhere road for anybody anyhow.

Yours truly,

Lemon

I think I’ve got a bug…a travel bug

My last few posts have been about the painful application process for an exchange year. Today, I thought I’d concentrate on a more positive aspect. It should have become clear by now that I feel a very pressing urge to leave Austria. But why is that? Austria is a beautiful country. Many tourists come here and love it, and I have been envied numerous times during my travels for living here – especially considering that Salzburg, where I live now, is the home of Mozart and The Sound of Music. Don’t get me wrong, I do appreciate all of the beauties this country has to offer, cultural and natural. Then there are a number of things I really appreciate about living here that I’ve only come to appreciate after being far away from home. These include, for example, hot running water, being able to drink the tap water, and the famous Austrian pastries.

However, one of the main things I miss in Austria is an ocean. I know, I know, we used to have access to the ocean, but that has been a while. Remember when Austria was an empire? Exactly. So wouldn’t we all like to wake up to a view like this from time to time?



I was lucky enough to do exactly that (i.e. waking up to a view like above) about three years ago on a trip to Central America. But that is not when I got the travel bug.

To be honest, I can’t remember exactly when this slight obsession with leaving Austria and constantly wanting to see different countries, meet new people, and learn new languages started, but I do remember one important incident. Towards the end of my time in middle school when I was fourteen, one of my teachers asked what I wanted to do with my life (career wise). The only thing I could think of was traveling.

At the age of sixteen I finally realized that I had been infected. For a mandatory internship for high school, I went to England (on my own) for a couple of months to work and live there. Ever since then I have been unable to stay in Austria for an extended period of time. Somehow I have managed to squeeze quite a number of trips into my tight schedule. So I have left Austria for at least a month every summer, and for a couple of long weekends in between, before I decided to leave for an exchange year. Recently I have cut back on my travel time, except to visit my brother who is studying in Sweden. This travel bug seems to be either hereditary or contagious.

Starting university hasn’t really changed the fact that people keep asking me what I would like to do with my life and, my favorite question, where I see myself in ten years. Even though many things have changed since I was fourteen, the answer to that question hasn’t: I want to travel. Okay, I have to admit that one little aspect has changed. Now I try to combine my travels with my academic goals. This is one of the main reasons why I would like to study abroad for a year. Of course when you’re studying a language you always have one more excuse to leave your home, i.e. to master a certain language.

However, I sometimes have to justify my constant urge for traveling to my relatives who somehow never got infected with the travel bug and prefer a life in the exact village where they grew up (a salute to rockelfe). When I have to explain myself, yet again, a brilliant German author comes into mind, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: “The best education for a clever person is found in travel.“ And I would never disagree with Goethe.

Yours truly,

Lemon

Insight # 1 Kids Rock. Duh.

Reader, I think it’s time to tell you some stories about my monster years. They say that once you've been an Au-Pair there are only two ways you can go: you are either traumatized and never ever want kids of your own or you simply loved it and are much more at ease about having some monsters of your own later in life. Three guesses ... which type am I?

Footprints
I think first a little (boring) history is in order. Bear with me. I have been a nanny or Au-Pair for a good five years and I’ve worked for five different families. I love “my” kids, all ten of them, to bits and I’m still in touch with them all. They are strewn across four countries on two continents.

My first family lived in Madrid, Spain. The dad was German and the mom Spanish so they wanted someone to speak German to their two children. The two chicos, Isabel and Javier, then one and three years old, were by far the most challenging as Isabel took over a month to accept me and to start speaking German to me. That time was also the most challenging culturally. I spoke no Spanish when I first got to Madrid and had to come to terms with the ways of an upper-class Spanish family. Not eating dinner in the dining room with the family, for instance, but in the kitchen with the maid was a first for me. This didn’t mean that the family didn’t like me or was snobbish. It was just the way things worked in their household.

Next I went to Scotland. Quite the change of scenery! I stayed with a young family on their organic farm near Edinburgh and looked after their two kids Wren (then ten months) and Casper (two years). You shouldn’t pick favorites. But the Cadells are pretty high up there. The parents were yet another mixed-nationality couple (come to think of it, four out of five sets of parents were international … interesting, I have to think about that some more), her from Georgia in the US and him from Scotland. There are always certain things you take on board when you work for a family, ideas on how you want to or really don’t want to raise your own children, techniques for surviving a Bob the Builder marathon on TV, recipes etc When I left Scotland I felt the urge to write everything those parents had taught me about raising sweet, happy, good kids down for future reference, but I figured I would never forget it anyway.


In the summer of 2007 I went to Australia where I looked after Danielle and Erin, then eight and six years old. They were the daughters of the only non-international couple I worked for. But they had their own interesting story. They were an American family who had moved down to Australia for three years because of the parents’ jobs. It was a pleasure to watch the girls settle in (they had just arrived when I started working for them) and make new friends in a country so far away. It was very cute to listen to their accents change.


When I decided to move to Salzburg for college, the first thing I did was reactivate my profile on the online Au-Pair site I had been using to find my families in the different countries. Soon I got a call from Hege, a Norwegian opera singer who was married to an Austrian actor. That’s how I started looking after little Albert, then three. I was Albert’s nanny for two years and I was with him so much that he started calling me “Mama” after a while, which was an intense experience.
When my little Albert moved to Vienna with his mom and dad, a family friend of theirs asked me if I wanted to start working for them. Even though I had planned for Albert to be my last nannying job, I eventually agreed. And that’s how I started looking after my current three monsters here in Salzburg!

End of history lesson. :)



Being a live-in Au-Pair vs being a nanny
Twice (in Spain and Scotland) I was a live-in Au-Pair, which means I had my own room in the family’s house, stayed with them permanently, ate with them, just lived the day-to-day family life with them. This had its advantages and disadvantages. One advantage of this was my daily commute to work in the morning – or lack thereof. It involved walking down a hallway and opening a door. (But work usually commuted to me and jumped on my bed until I got up and/or threatened to strangle it.) The big disadvantage for live-ins is that they never really stop working. You can’t refuse to play a round of Candyland (or seven) just because it’s past 5 pm. That’s not how monsters roll.
As a live-in, you get attached to the little guys even quicker which is wonderful, but also heart-wrenching when you eventually have to leave. I recall a particularly hard good-bye. Leaving the farm and the kids in Scotland was by far the hardest thing I have ever done. Having my little guy Casper crying and screaming my name in the farm yard as I tried to put my suitcases in the back of his dad’s truck really broke my heart.

With the monsters now I’m basically on call. I have certain days of the week when I’m always there, especially when there are a lot of extra-curricular activities going on that they have to be taken to or picked up from. The rest of the week I just have to be flexible and so do the parents. The monsters’ mom can call me whenever she needs me, but she usually has a back-up plan in case I’m not available.

monsters 1, 2 and 3 :)

I love being a nanny. Especially when …
… a monster smacks their lips at dinner and says “exquisite” with a French accent and a mouthful of pasta alla yours truly
… a monster, aged four, starts shaking her booty and singing to a German pop song playing on the radio in the kitchen, telling you to join in
… a monster asks you to cuddle with them because you “feel so soft”
… a monster yells “get off of my cloud” after you tried to reprimand it with a “hey, you”

But not so much when …
… a monster throws an I want a cookie/to watch TV/to mash all the play-doh into one big brown ball NOW tantrum
… a recently potty-trained monster suddenly sits very still and gets that look in their eyes and then says “… uh-oh”
… a monster tells you that they hate you and want their mommy NOW
… a monster finishes your sentence with a loud and hearty “HELL” when you were just able to stop yourself at “what the –“

So that's the story! Join me again soon for more ... also, I am collecting a few lip-smackingly scrumptious, monster/student approved recipes for you! Any requests? Drop me a line or two in the comment box.

Oh and this one is for you, Red Shoes:

me and Wren, 2006
:)