One Week In

 

Things that I want:

1. A written list/schedule of what I'm supposed to be doing every day, so I have some sort of structure and know what is expected of me.

2. To know what days/times I have off more than 1-2 days before so I can actually make plans with my friends and not feel so isolated out in the suburbs.

I've been here a week and these things are really stressing me out. Though I may just be interpreting her intonation wrong since I don't always understand 100% what my host Mom is saying in German, I feel like she sometimes thinks I'm a bit dumb for not doing something she told me days ago in a list with 10 other things. Usually I'm given a long verbal list of all the things I might have to do, but sometimes she just does them and sometimes she is all "I'm late for work you really need to brush his teeth with him!" How am I supposed to know what I should be doing if sometimes I'm asked to do it and sometimes it's done by somebody else and no one says anything to me? I've asked for the past several days if we could sit down and write down what exactly my responsibilities are and when I need to do them, so I'm not always so shell-shocked, but no one seems to ever have time. We were also supposed to talk about my au-pair contract because there's a lot of things written in it about how many nights off and days off I should be getting and can request off, that I'm pretty sure I'm not currently getting. Mostly I just need to know when I'm actually supposed to be working so I'm not always following people around, stressed that I should be doing something.

I'm supposed to be in charge of getting the 5-year old dressed and brushing his teeth in the morning and sometimes getting him ready for bed. I have not even once been able to successfully get him to brush his teeth. Every single time he runs away, grabs a toy, hides. I take the toy away, he screams at the top of his lungs and slaps me. I say "Nein! Du darfst nicht mich schlagen!" in my best stern voice and hold his hands, let go, and he slaps me again. Yesterday I got spit in the face and also hit in the face with a small plunger. When I try to make him food after school he will purposely grab a bottle of water and pour it on the floor in front of me. I'm trying really hard not to let it get to me and hold it against him, but I can't help but dread when he comes home from school and really do not enjoy his company. At least the parents back up whatever I say to him, but if this doesn't get better in a few weeks I think I'm going to seek other employment because I can't deal with this for a year. They want me to eventually bike with him alone to his kindergarten, but he absolutely does not listen to me so I'm terrified he'll just bike into the middle of the road in front of a car with me, not to mention I'm still not super fast on my bike as I'm not used to biking all the time, so while I totally don't mind riding the bike and enjoy it, I can't keep up with him and he doesn't listen if I say to slow down. It's just frustrating because the Mom tells me to simply take his toy away and pick him up, but it's not so easy when he's racing around a couch, kicking, slapping and spitting at me.

Luckily the other kids are fine, sometimes they want to watch TV a bit longer and I have to turn it off on them, but they generally listen to reason or will joke around for 5 minutes and then do what they're told. I knew going in I didn't have much experience with the really young kids, but I didn't think it would be this bad.

I'm at a low point and I'm going to give it a month to see if I feel better about everything. I'm just really frustrated and feel like I have no control over anything and no ability to have my own life. I feel like I have a lot of sporadic free time during the day, but never quality free time where I can actually meet with people and be social. I don't need to always be out partying, but I can't always just sit here alone as it makes me feel a bit trapped. I just found out the family's first au-pair only stayed 3 months. The most recent stayed a year, but it seems she didn't really go out much as the host family seemed really surprised that I wanted to go to a club with my friends on September 3rd and said I'd probably have to walk the dog, even if I come back at 3am, as they go out sailing that day (or something). Their last au-pair is married and still lives here, so maybe that explains it.

We'll see. I really don't want to have to leave, but if I end up continuing to feel so crazy I might have to. I've only been here a week, so I imagine it will get better. Besides the 5 year-old and the family not being very good at clearly delegating responsibilities, things are good. They let me get whatever food I want from the store, are paying for German classes all year even though they don't have to, I get to be really active and feel generally pretty healthy, I like the breakfast and Abendbrot routine. The Dad taught me how to fix my flat tire on my bike this morning and while it's sort of isolating out here, it is beautiful and I like all the bike paths. I like their dog, taking her for walks and speaking Dog-German (yesterday I let her off the leash and she ran in someone's house, oops) and I like how the oldest son is very understanding and takes time to explain to me how things in the family work and what I should be doing, tells me when he wants time alone to do his stuff, etc. The fact that I speak German from mornings to evenings is very helpful too, as I do really need to be fluent by the end of the year. I just really need more of a balance between work and life and to be given a better idea of what I should be doing and a more solid schedule. I know the family is stressed in the morning getting ready and running around between afternoon activities, but I get stressed because I feel like they think I suck since everything is always told to me quickly as a side-comment.

So there you have it.

Mythological Creatures in Germany

 

You’re sitting in a bed, in a house, in the middle of a farm in northern Germany. There are two spiders you’ve been watching for days in two separate crevices of your bedroom. You’re afraid to kill them because of the sound they’ll make when you squash them, an ongoing problem, but also because you’re living on a farm and you don’t think you’re supposed to do such things. What if they eat some pest, contribute to the greater good? The last thing you want is to murder the Greater Good.

You have dirt stuck under your fingernails and that makes you feel tough. Yet when you go to bed each night you shut the lights and rush under the covers lest some creature gets you. After telling your host this, she gives you a key to lock the door at night, which is when you realize it’s mostly mythological creatures you’re afraid of and keys won’t keep them out anyway. You’d prefer a unicorn over the bogeyman, but in reality it’s probably just the mice having tea parties in the walls again.

There is a lot of time to think and you’re not sure if you’re running away from something or towards it. Maybe you’re just running, so may as well enjoy the running for its own sake, and you are. Make a note to live in the moment. Page through a found self-help book and stumble upon the fourth Secret to Life: “Live in the moment.” Go figure. Think about how it’s even possible to live in the moment, anyway. Your to-do list rings in your mind and you think you will write it down soon, a list of things to do and pay for when you have access to fast internet again. You should probably book a flight back to America eventually. Ponder whether you really want to go back to America. Think about the unknown abyss of the future. Of all the things everyone else is doing and how you can’t make yourself want them. Of being a vagabond indefinitely. Wonder how long that last paycheck and what’s left of that money you’ve saved since you were 17 for just such an occasion will last. Probably not the rest of your life. Or through the summer. Same difference.

There’s always this problem: When you leave America, you think of all these things you might want to do when you get back, all these people you don’t want to loose in the woodwork and this sense that you need more closure than America has already given you, that bastard. Closure from what, you don’t know. Just closure. You always want things to be completely beat to death before you leave them. You’re not sure how this fares for a country. You think of your friend who asked why you’d ever even consider leaving the Greatest Country in the World for more than an extended holiday? How could you ever fathom never coming back for good? You don’t dislike America, per se, but you want to become an expatriate indefinitely just to oppose that thought whole-heartedly. You do miss pumpkin ale though, quite terribly.

You’re not looking forward to the second bought of reverse culture shock, even if it’s months away. You realized when you went to England that being able to understand all of the language spoken around you is stressful. You want to listen to everything at once, trying to understand all of the people chatting on the bus up Elm Grove, and eventually turn your headphones back on in defeat, exhausted. Make a note not to compare everything to Prague when you get back, but know it’s a losing battle. Hate how obnoxious you’re going to sound. You’ll miss the public transportation, sitting on trains and the trams, the Czech language. All the languages, really. You’ll miss feeling useful on this farm, more useful than you ever felt during your 4 months teaching English. You’ll miss the Friendly Sheep, her especially, looking at you with big eyes when you come to refill the water bucket at night. Her mother forgot her so she likes humans and you like her.

You’ll even miss not knowing what the fuck is going on around you half the time, what with your 30 word approach to each respective language. You think you’re just starting to get a hang of the metric system. You know that minus 8 degrees Celsius is cold and you don’t even need to convert it to Fahrenheit. You know what you weigh in kilos.

You think of a passage you read in Into the Wild yesterday, “I was surprised, as always, by how easy the act of leaving was, and how good it felt. The world was suddenly rich with possibility.” You hate yourself for being such a hipster sometimes, but think that if you call yourself a hipster it negates your hipsterness so you’re probably safe. Whew.

You’re not sure if leaving is easy, but that passage resonated with you somewhere. Goodbyes were always hard for you. Hard to understand. What is an ending and what should it mean? What does it mean to everyone else? You always put them off until last minute, clutching your drink, sipping slowly until it’s warm and flat in the corner of the pub, and then somehow you make your feet move to the train, bus, plane taking you away from those you care about while you sit teary-eyed and confused at the whole debacle, doubting. You could just stay here, you think. You could. But you don’t. You’ve made a habit of crying on public transportation in the last few years, but maybe you’re just on public transportation a lot.

Everything feels so profound when you’re leaving. Goodbyes are hard, but leaving is easy, you decide. Leaving places is easy for you, but if there’s one thing you’ll ever regret from your life up ‘til now it’s your inability to leave people when you should have. Like America, everything always needs to be beat to death until nothing interesting enough is left to ask any more questions. You think of how much time you wasted being unnecessarily unhappy since you were 15 and hope you at least learned a lesson this year besides how to conceal your inner-thoughts and desires from yourself. You wonder if you like to travel just because you’re afraid of getting trapped in relationships you don’t know how to get yourself out of. Then again, you also like staring out windows. When you discovered you could stick your head out the train windows in the Czech Republic there was no turning back. You were a dog in a car. Tongue out, smile wide. There’s something about being in trains and buses that makes you feel content. The motion. No matter what you do, you’re being productive. You have a destination and you’re working on getting there. You can sleep the time away, you can twiddle your thumbs. No matter, still going.

You’re inwardly proud of yourself for breaking up with Prague and believe it’s a first step in the right direction. She was a beautiful lover, with castles for eyes, cherubs carved into her skin and a clock delivering both death and the twelve apostles to you on the hour, but you never really paid attention. Cobblestones flowed in every direction, creating a path between you, but you two had some fundamental differences you just couldn’t shake and you were tired of fighting. She was fun, but you wanted to be understood more completely. It was precisely the hardest decision of your life.

Mostly you hope you can transfer your new decision-making methods to the next person you’re with that gives you that familiar wordless anxiety at your core. You know, the one that splits the pros and cons list right in two, ruining any attempt to have things laid out for you in a logical fashion, clear as day. Prague split you right down the center: Sixteen and sixteen. But somehow your fingers typed the letters and your voice led the conversations you needed to move on to the next phase of your life. Maybe you’re really growing up.

You’re not sure about this growing up thing. Not the growing in itself, for you don’t really mind getting older. You noticed your first wrinkle forming and viewed it as a rite of passage more than anything. Since you don’t remember Coming of Age like all the books say you should, this will have to do, won’t it? You’re worried about when the line is drawn between when you can have fun and when you can’t. Not the Sex, Drugs and Rock-n- Roll, like everyone else, though you could always use a bit of all of them, you guess. You don’t want to have to put away your sense of adventure and the absurd, much less pass up a good playground. You don’t ever want to be one of those people who talks about things they can no longer wear, play or do because they are “too old”. You think you won’t really mind the whole being wiser thing, however. You’re sick and tired of losing sleep over these things you’ve yet to experience.

But there you go thinking outside of the moment again. You’re not sure any fully functioning human brain is capable of this. You damn anyone that never dropped you on your head when you were a child, but maybe thinking ahead is not so bad. You always did like making lists…

From across the room

"Why I scanned the crowd looking for a familiar face as I followed the signs to baggage claim, I'm not sure. I needed to quit doing that. You don't know anybody in a new city, but suddenly everybody you set eyes on looks exactly like somebody you know or used to know, or something about his walk or her hair makes you think that person could be somebody you know. Or used to know. I felt muffled in wool, pale, out-of-it among the hordes of pretty people." -- Amanda Boyden (Pretty Little Dirty)


Often one of the first things I hear within a few minutes of speaking to a new person is, "You remind me of my friend X..." Are we grasping for some hint of familiarity or does the human brain just need to categorize people by quirks, hair and swaggar? This happens to me everytime I move somewhere. I don't know anybody, but everyone looks familiar.

New City Syndrome.

The word I'm looking for is palimpsest.

Sometimes it hits me that I live smack dab in the center of Europe.
That this is not some Czech-speaking version of America and I am in fact an ocean away from everything I knew before August 8th.

It's the cobblestones that give it away, really.

I was walking home tonight and saw cobblestones peeking out under the blacktop of the sidewalk in Vršovice where I live. I remembered when someone told me that New York City still has all its cobblestones under that asphalt. I wonder what New York City would feel like without its black coating. Cobblestones against massive skyscrapers seems an odd union to me. It blows my mind to think of peeling the tar off, like the skin of an orange. Picking it away in one big spiral and finding all these stones, reminding us of a time when New York City looked less like New York City.

I still don't like New York City. I leave feeling overwhelmed every time.

I always have this image in my head of my feet touching the ground, the ground being connected to everything. It's hard for me to put my finger on the mostly intangible concept of a country. I feel like I understand most of everything that's going on, I just don't understand when people speak to me. How can I be somewhere else? I'm still living, breathing, sleeping, eating. One thing I've learned is how much can be gathered from body language and context. The eyes.

I think coming here when I did, after graduation, has solidified my perpetual state of motion. Where is home? Home is no longer home. I've been gone, in and out, of the house I grew up in for what feels like so long now that it's not really where I belong anymore. To be fair, I'm not sure I ever belonged there. I can still walk from the kitchen to my bedroom in complete darkness without falling over, waking anyone up. I remember that wave of nostalgia that hit me when I was 19 and afraid of growing up, moving out. Not just for the year this time. A lease with my name on it (or as it turns out, just a room). Time has made it so I'm not even nostalgic anymore. About that, anyway.

I think I spend most of my days just looking at everything. I sit in the coffee shop and look at the Czech newspaper (because I can't read it). Somehow all the nonesense, sprinkled with words I recognize here and there, is still interesting. I learn a new word everyday.

Generally I feel like I'm on one of those pirate ships you ride at the amusement park, the type that goes only in two directions: rock to the left and rock to the right. Act excited. Who would pay to be seasick? I'm never sure which direction I'm headed, whether today will be one of those pessimistic ones or the type I'll spend looking up at the detailed architecture of each building I walk by. Can you imagine a time when people were patient enough to carve angels between windows?

Mostly I'm okay with this. It depends on the day.

I am gonna make it, through this year, if it kills me.

I feel like a crazy person, mostly. It's been a rough couple weeks here for me. I've been generally silent, until lots of wine last night, when some part of me decided I should actually try to process all these thoughts, somewhat logically, instead of continually ignoring them. Every other minute I'm doubting every decision I've ever made in my life, especially the ones that led me to be here. The fact that getting a job was such a mission, and now that getting enough hours to pay rent is another curveball that's been thrown at me, is a bit overwhelming. The amount of money I'll have to pay for my visa and all of the work that goes along with that doesn't help.

These ominous tasks (and pricetags) looming find me looking up jobs on the Portland craigslist more often than not. Browsing E-Access for real jobs wherever. Thinking of other cities in which I'd be happy to grow roots for awhile in America, or maybe not America. Fuck if I know. My point is, I'm having a lot of trouble deciding whether I've made the right decision, whether I'm continuing to make the right one, spending all this money, money I've saved up since I was 17 years old, and not getting much back just yet.

Does the right decision even matter? I'm living in Europe, I'm out of my parents' house, doing cool things. I have a great opportunity, one my parents and most of my friends haven't. Everyone tells me I'm so brave, but I think I'm just really good at leaving. Having to settle somewhere and make things work for more than a year is 100% more terrifying. Once I have a schedule and am more stable in the visa and job department I can start my travels, visit all my friends in Germany, Austria, Spain, Italy, England, Ireland...

Sometimes I'm sure I hate everything about teaching, that I'm utter crap at it and am wasting everyone's time. It's definitely not my calling, sure. I probably won't continue teaching in this capacity when I get back to the States, but it's hard to tell where it all stands after that. Some days are not so bad and yes, it is a new skill I'm learning and will take some getting used to and of course some practice. The 5000 job rejections didn't quite help my self-esteem, either. I don't think I'm THAT bad of a teacher. I graduated with a Strong Pass, so there had to have been something promising in my brain.

I wrote this in my other journal, but jobs that don't have an end time at the conclusion of the day completely stress me out. I hate that I can always do more, I can always do better. Sometimes I just want the locked door of my workplace to tell me it's out of my hands. You don't get that with lesson planning, and so I am continually very anxious. I always think I'm slacking, whether I am or not doesn't really matter.

I just wish I knew when I was being homesick and when I was being reasonable. Or should I say America-sick? I don't want to go home. It was easier last time I lived abroad. I could channel all of my angst into the fact that I was in a Long Distance Relationship and that it sucked. The fact that we fought every five minutes, that I always felt stressed and guilty, also made it quite easy to displace all my homesickness into general angst, worry and anger. Sure moving to Brighton was hard for awhile, yeah I had the whole relationship thing. I spent many nights crying on the phone, yes. It took awhile to make a group of friends I really identified with or to get to know the ones I did, took awhile to not feel like the token Queer Older American in the mass of first years, to stop caring, to realize which friends weren't the right ones. No language barrier though, however hilarious British-English might be for me at times ("Did you say fairy cakes?!"). Culture not that different. Not as hard.

Now that it's fall, I've been missing a lot of things. I miss "Crazy Wednesday" $1 lattes at the Elbow Room. Parties in the Friedmans. I miss being able to find kale everywhere, the food co-op, the forest and mountains in Massachusetts, bonfires on the beach on Long Island. Triple ristretto espresso at Northampton and Amherst Coffee. The crisp scent of autumn in Massachusetts and being surrounded with intelligent, assertive, often half-naked women at Smith College. The rock-climbing wall, canoeing for free in Paradise pond. All things that are free, actually.

I don't miss the work and honestly, Northampton is one of the last places I'd want to be this year (after Long Island and other cities that are mostly conservative and plagued by large amounts of traffic jams). Sure, I'd love to visit my friends that still go to Smith, but living there would not be good for me this year and I know that.

Sometimes I also miss the progressive nature of Northampton. I miss seeing girls holding hands, feminist boys, locally grown food, bike kitchens, catching masses of people hula-hooping in the park as I'm walking back home. Prague is great, yes, and I'm sure the language barrier keeps me from understanding a lot of what's going on around me, really taking it in and understanding what the city feels like to someone who isn't a little English-speaking expat girl from America, but it's depressing sometimes to see just little inklings of progressive ideas here and there when I'm used to having it in my face everywhere I go like it was in the Pioneer Valley. True to its name, "Northampton: Where the Coffee is Strong and So Are the Women." Sure, there are a lot of ignorant rich hipster kids, a lot of sheltered girls only at Smith because they hate or are afraid of men, but it was nice always being inspired like that. Prague has a lot of potential, I've got to throw it a bone, saying that communism just ended in 1989. Welcome to the Real World, Nicole.

I think I'm just having a quarter-life crisis. Adjusting here is hard, especially with all the bureaucracy bullshit, but realizing that I actually have to figure out what I want to do with my life, that there is no more structure lining my future, is harder. This was it, the last plan. I just wish I felt more confident about the teaching thing. Having to fight so hard and spend so much money for it when I'm not even sure I'm good at it or want it is rough.

If my visa situation doesn't work out, I think my plan is to travel west through Europe and visit all my friends, fly back to NY, see East Coast friends, then drive out to the West Coast (probably Portland) and get a job, make friends, live life. I'd feel pretty upset and defeated if I spent all the money and effort here just to have my visa get rejected, but it's good to have a backup plan.

I have my entire life to live in America. I just can't decide between what I want and what I think I should do. It's a fine line, you see.

What the TEFL?!

Wow, I've already taught two English lessons to two different intermediate classes and today was only my third day of TEFL class! As you may gather from that, my TEFL course is pretty intense. Like finals week intense, well, maybe an easy finals week at Smith as I'm not quite at the I'm-going-to-burst-out-crying-because-I-dropped-a-piece-of-broccoli-in-the-dining-hall stage. I have class from roughly 10am to 6pm everyday with an hour and a half lunch off. I've taught two 15 minute lessons the past two days with two other TEFL students (each of us did 15 minutes for a total of 45) and Friday I'm teaching a 45 minute lesson on my own, out of a total of 5 such lessons. For each of these lessons, I have to hand in a detailed lesson plan. Additionally, I'm going to be working with a student for one-on-one lessons. For someone with absolutely no experience teaching before this Monday, I've certainly thrown myself into it! My classes thus far have been great and so have the teachers, I can't say I've been bored during class much at all! Much more than I can say for half of my time in high school and college.

Haven't been out much since the course started, so I'm excited for the weekend. I'm currently super overwhelmed as I apparently need to start applying for jobs this week so that I can snag a job and get all the work visa paperwork done before my tourist visa runs out. On top of that, I'm trying to look into flats and figure out whose staying here and where I might want to live. Unfortunately, a lot of people from my class are leaving after the class or not really sure if they'll stay, so who knows who and where I'll end up with!

Anyway, two things I've noticed in Prague so far. One, peeing in public and people letting their small children of either gender pee in public seems to be pretty standard. As I was walking through a park in Prague 2 by myself the other day I saw a mother holding her kid in the AIR with its pants down and noticed a STREAM of pee shooting up in the air to the ground from it. I had to force myself not to stare as to not appear a pedophile, but I was pretty impressed with the projectile pee job going down. Second, fast-food of the food court variety is actually served on real plates with metal cutlery that you return to them in the mall near my flat! None of that throw away styrofoam bullshit. Very trusting of them, I must say, but yay for less waste!

I'm in that oh-shit-I-just-realized-I'm-in-another-country-with-no-real-friends stage right now and am trying to work through it. It's a bit hard as there's only 4 of us (2 in each flat) in the Hotel Pivovar and it seems there's much more people in other housing grouped together so that they get to be more social. Ah well. Mission Friends will begin as soon as I have some goddamn free time!

Sbohem teď!