When going to live or study abroad, one usually picks countries such as Italy, France, United Kingdom, and Australia…right? I ended up in Norway! Now I don’t mean this in a bad way at all, it’s different yes, but different is always good.
Now Im the kind of person who, when told at a young age that I need to travel the world and see everything there is, thinks you should make every effort to do that. Thanks to my mother and her love for travel, even though she doesn’t do it often, is how I became in love with the thought of having to see the world. Thanks to her, I am now a journalism major with the dream to one day be a travel journalist and work for the travel channel. Watch out Anthony Bourdain and Samantha Brown!
So here I am, a 21 year old, taking a semester off to go live and work in Norway. My name is Mariana, and for the next four months I shall be keeping a blog about my experience as an au pair and student in Norway. What is an au pair you ask? An au pair is when a young adult, mainly between the ages of 17-25, goes abroad to live with a host family and works as a nanny. You get paid, and get free room and board. Pretty sweet deal! How did I get this job? Let’s go back a few years so you understand everything.
In 2007, the year I graduated from high school, I had been accepted to several good universities, but ended up going to a junior college for several reasons. Those reasons are irrelevant. Now due to economy, there have been several changes to the schooling system, one of them being that no university will accept students for spring semesters. I just finished my fall semester with 71 units, and cannot transfer to any other university until fall 2010. So I had two choices, take another semester and only take extracurricular courses or travel.
So I chose travel! I looked for many different ways of traveling at a low cost, and thankfully found the au pair website that led me to my host family. I applied, set up a profile page and waited for a host family to choose me. It was sort of like a dating website, where one can view others profiles, others can view yours and then you take it from there. Well my host family found me, and called me one day at work.
They offered to pay full trip, any vacation trips that the family goes on (which we will, we will be going to Austria), tuition fees, transportation expenses plus my monthly pay.
Stig, my host dad, is a CEO of an electrical engineering company, and is full Norwegian. Zoyla, my host mom is a nurse and is from Venezuela, so she speaks Spanish. And their two-year-old son is Sebastian, who speaks Norwegian and Spanish. My job is to be his nanny and help him learn English! Piece of cake….I hope!
I will be going from 80 degree weather to minus20 degree weather! Big change! How will I survive? I have no idea. This Mexican is not used to cold weather! But Ill have to find some inner warmth and unleash it to save my butt! My boyfriend makes fun of me, because he knows I’m always cold. But ill show him!
So welcome to all my readers. Together we shall travel and experience Norway! So buckle up because we leave in 6 days!!