Those of you who have been reading for a while will remember the au pair chronicles—a serial about how it is that I ended up in Germany and what it was like spending 10 months au pairing for a insanely rich family in Frankfurt am Main. Well, I’ve been busy writing new installments to share with you during operation whirlwind baby. But since a hell of a lot of new readers have become regulars since I first began the series a year ago, I thought I would start by re-publishing the series thus far—both to buy me baby time and to get everyone caught up before continuing the saga. You can find an index of the entire series here. This segment was originally published on February 10, 2010.

My journal entries from that lonesome week in Cyprus are full of embarrassingly adolescent ramblings about a boy I had a crush on at the time. (Embarrassing because he turned out to have the intellectual capacity of a cave troll, while I assumed, for entire days at a time, that we didn’t talk about anything interesting because my German was still too elementary.)

For those around us Cyprus was the escape, the fantasy. I fled the beach for the page, dreaming up dates, jobs I would be hired for, books I would write, countries I would live in, languages I would learn—anything that would transport me for even a few minutes from my daemonic charges. The resort walls were not there to keep others out, no!, they were there to keep me in, and I was trapped there until an angelic voice would speak to me mercifully from above: “Now boarding flight 386 to Frankfurt International.” Oh hark how the herald angels sing!

While Franci became more and more aloof, Joseph became more and more doting. “Somebody has a cru-ush,” Janet sang at me across the dinner table, nodding toward Jo with her head. He looked up from the plastic car he’d been racing down the white table cloth and up at me. “Nikki, I have to poop.” I contemplated strangling her, smashing my wine glass on the table and leaping across the table, but the alcohol had already stunned me into placidity, an escape just as effective as my journaled daydreams. Instead I stood up and led Jo off to the bathroom.

My other escape was the small fitness studio where I ran on my plastic hamster wheel until blood had pounded every last thought out of my head. It was the one and, I am certain, only time in my life in which I will ever have washboard abs. So this is why people in prison end up with enormous muscles, I thought.

In two hastily taken pictures—”I guess I just want some sort of proof that I was really here,” I shrugged as I forced the camera into Janet’s hand—and the only two pictures of me from those ten days, my smile is a grimace.

The three of us slept in the same room, in the same bed; they were both afraid to take a turn on the small cot symbolically placed there upon our arrival and I refused to accept discomfort during sleep on top of the insults and the spit. They spread out, snored, kicked—there was no physical escape. Sleep, my most holy of rituals, was disturbed and cut off each morning too short. All that was missing was the yellow wallpaper, and I would have been ripe for a straight jacket and pills served regularly in little paper cups.

Halfway through the trip and with the theatrical grace that was quickly becoming her trademark, Janet told me to take a day off and go on one of the day trips the resort organized for the guests. As if giving me one day off in ten was a special gift she didn’t have to give me, but would, because she was just that nice. Technically it was illegal for me to work for eight days straight without a day or night off.

Technically. Some of my au pair friends were required to work hours like this all the time, and I was only being asked to do so because we were on a Greek Island. Maybe I never would have seen Cyprus otherwise, maybe I was the ungrateful little snot in this equation. Drink yourself numb! Cry yourself to sleep! Aldiana Cyrpus is perfect for everyone! The words took on a gruesome, futuristic tone, the way the would sound if I’d read them in Brave New World or 1984. And we would be leaving in two days. It was a tome I chanted until it became a prayer. “Two more days, two more days, two more days.”

Nicosia

My mother had wired me some money so that I could take a few interesting trips, and I signed up for Nicosia. Nicosia, I read, was the capital of Cyprus and a violent, tumultuous city since the 60s when it was first divided into Turkish and Greek sections. I could, an Aldiana barbie told me, pay someone to let me climb a ladder and peer over the wall at the Turkish side. (In 2008 a dividing wall was torn down in an attempt to symbolically create unity. Of course symbol and reality don’t tend to drink at the same bars, and the city remains “the world’s last divided capital.”)

But none of the other resort guests wanted to deal with tumult on their vacation, the trip was canceled, and I ended up on a bus to Larnaka instead.

Larnaka

How refreshing it was, to be out of the resort and away from my keepers! How refreshing to see a city whose architecture was influenced by eastern winds. My escape from Aldiana lent an exotic air to everything I saw. The man with skin like bark hunched over and between mountains of fabric in a tiny stone garage, the sandstone church and fort, the ragged tops of buildings that stretched out beneath the fort terrace and away from the graying sea, the Greek-lettered signs.

I wandered aimlessly through town, snapping pictures, inhaling my temporary independence like a fix-starved junkie. Little junk stores seemed as if brimming with treasure, alleys careened with sensual vines, and the old man sitting on the corner was most certainly a seer.

The town was everything that Aldiana was not: crumbling in places, pulsing, a little chaotic, alive. There was dirt and there was magic, there were real people filled with joy and sorrow and ambition. There were no hoses snaking the streets, and so there was little to green the landscape. There were most certainly poisonous spiders lurking in the cracks, and no one said hello to me pleasantly as I wandered down narrow streets.

Those of you who have been reading for a while will remember the au pair chronicles—a serial about how it is that I ended up in Germany and what it was like spending 10 months au pairing for a insanely rich family in Frankfurt am Main. Well, I’ve been busy writing new installments to share with you during operation whirlwind baby. But since a hell of a lot of new readers have become regulars since I first began the series a year ago, I thought I would start by re-publishing the series thus far—both to buy me baby time and to get everyone caught up before continuing the saga. You can find an index of the entire series here. This segment was originally published on February 9, 2010.

The war started with a bruise. Franci became a bitchy little snot in a matter of hours, twisted my skin until it turned black when I told her it was bedtime, and ran screaming into the “kids’ disco” across from the clubhouse

The disco was set up like a regular disco, but with lower tables and non-alcoholic drinks. I walked slowly in after her, counting, breathing deeply, doing anything I could to keep the rage in my head and out of my hands.

“Franci, what you just did really hurt my feelings. We’re going to go back to the room now, come on.” That’s what I had planned on saying. But when she saw me across the room she screamed, “Asshole, stupid asshole, I hate you!”

I turned around and left without a word. The situation was beyond my control; I needed to get mom and dad involved or I was going to break into a thousand little pieces that no one would ever be able to put back together.

Jens and Janet were sitting at a round table in the dining room with Franci’s new friend’s parents, eating fresh dates and drinking wine. My voice was shaking as I held out my arm and explained what had just happened. “Do you see that? Your daughter just did that to me. Then she ran into the disco, and as soon as I walked in the door she screamed and called me a stupid asshole. She won’t listen to me. I need one of you to step in.” Jens threw down his napkin, disgusted.

“I’ll take care of it,” he assured me, “Meet me back at the room.”

I could hear Franci’s howls from across the resort. Jens had her by the ear and was dragging her down the path. “You acted despicably tonight. If you don’t cut it out I’m sending you home on the next plane all by yourself.” She screamed louder. “Do you want to go home by yourself?” She screamed louder still. I stood waiting at the door, and he dragged her in past me and ordered her into pajamas and bed.

When Franci refused to talk to me the next morning, Janet suggested I ignore her. I was glad for the break, but ignoring someone who doesn’t want to have anything to do with you in the first place seemed like an ineffectual strategy. Fuck it. And then there was one.

With Franci out of the way—she now spent her time with her new friend James, and since James went to the Dolphin Club, so did she—Franz Joseph was easier to handle. With two there was always one who didn’t want to do whatever I suggested which meant that in the end we did nothing but sit in the hotel room: them hypnotized by Greek television, me staring longingly at the beach out of the terrace window.

Joseph preferred the heated pool to the beach, so one afternoon we joined the older Cole children there for a swim. In the deep pool I insisted that he put on his swimmies. He screamed. I insisted again. So he hocked a big lugey and spit in my face. I picked him up like a surf-board, slung the beach bag over my shoulder and carried him kicking and crying back to the hotel room. Fuck the Mediterranean, fuck Cyprus, fuck all-expenses paid. Now I understood Aldiana’s other motto, the one that was constantly being sung on the television commercials, “Back to the place you’re longing for.” I couldn’t wait to go home.

Those of you who have been reading for a while will remember the au pair chronicles—a serial about how it is that I ended up in Germany and what it was like spending 10 months au pairing for a insanely rich family in Frankfurt am Main. Well, I’ve been busy writing new installments to share with you during operation whirlwind baby. But since a hell of a lot of new readers have become regulars since I first began the series a year ago, I thought I would start by re-publishing the series thus far—both to buy me baby time and to get everyone caught up before continuing the saga. You can find an index of the entire series here. This segment was originally published on February 8, 2010.

Au pairing isn’t a highly paid job, and The German Man dictates earnings: a 285 euro monthly stipend and at least one day off each week. The benefits are nestled between the lines—in the room, board, and health insurance the family is required to provide—and between work days, when the rich German matriarch announces one morning that you will be accompanying the family on their vacation to Cyprus.

A four-hour flight brought us from Frankfurt International to Larnaka International, and taxis brought us to the Aldiana resort where we’d be staying. The family, Janet informed me, would be staying in a suite located on the edge of the resort. The twins and I would be sharing a room just between the main clubhouse and the beach. I was not keen on completely dissolving the work/play boundary I meticulously maintained at home, but was willing to ignore the contractual breech in exchange for an all-expense-paid island getaway.

Aldiana is the German answer to Club Med. Book a vacation at an Aldiana resort and you can relax in a walled complex far from the messy cultural details of whatever country you are visiting (an irrelevant detail!) and socialize with your compatriots in your native tongue. I suppose this is the reason that the club motto is “a vacation with friends.” (Translation: “a vacation with other rich white people.”)

The Aldiana pamphlet says: “ALDIANA Zypern is perfect for everyone—singles, young couples, young children, and teens. The resort comprises a wide variety of sports, relaxation, and entertainment, all set amidst the beautiful coastal flora and fauna of Cyprus.”

Here another translation is needed: Aldiana Cyprus is perfect for everyone with money and for everyone too worried about security and/or xenophobic to bother with the actual country and people of Cyprus. Aldiana Cyprus is also perfect for people who think they would enjoy the “beautiful coastal flora and fauna of Cyprus” but aren’t actually prepared to deal with a desert climate.

But there is little that nature can do that Aldiana (cough, civilization) can’t take care of. And so dozens of hoses snaked the resort lawn, irrigating the Aldiana palms and the sparse Aldiana grass. As for the fauna, the poisonous spiders that would otherwise be inhabiting the landscape, an employee told us, are kept at bay with regular doses of insecticide sprayed across the entire property. Coastal flora and fauna indeed.

Greek travel propaganda had led me to believe that we’d be laying on white- sand beaches, but the beaches of Cyprus are gray, unspectacular in compar- ison perhaps, but beautiful and exotic to eyes accu- stomed to Jersey shore. That first day the twins put on their swimmies, I waded into the Mediterranean for the first time, and it was as glorious as it probably sounds.

In my former life I had been vaguely aware that resorts like Aldiana existed, but I don’t think I really believed in them. Like Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny they were just pleasant little myths that worked well on television. Real people wouldn’t actually visit them. Why would they want to? You could save yourself time and money and travel to the German coast to the same effect.

The employees—sailing and diving instructors, bartenders and babysitters—were all generically good looking and insistently pleasant. If you passed an employee on the way to the beach he or she would smile and say hello. Always friendly, always polite. Failure to do so, I imagined, earned you a flogging from the boss. And that might ruin your tan. I imagined that nights they let out steam in the employee lounge, out of sight of paying guests, Dirty Dancing style. Welcome to the Aldiana bubble: polite, friendly, safe, pleasant, plastic.

If you were tired of tanning, you could take diving and sailing lessons, if you were tired of the Mediterranean you could take a dip in the heated indoor pool, and if you got tired of taking care of your children, you could send them to the Dolphin Clubhouse—the resort’s day care service. Jens, always wanting to play good cop, had promised me that the twins would spend the entire day there, leaving me free to do what I pleased. The reality was that the twins didn’t want to go to the Dolphin Club. They wanted to spend time with their siblings and their parents, and instead they were stuck with me.

Those of you who have been reading for a while will remember the au pair chronicles—a serial about how it is that I ended up in Germany and what it was like spending 10 months au pairing for a insanely rich family in Frankfurt am Main. Well, I’ve been busy writing new installments to share with you during operation whirlwind baby. But since a hell of a lot of new readers have become regulars since I first began the series a year ago, I thought I would start by re-publishing the series thus far—both to buy me baby time and to get everyone caught up before continuing the saga. You can find an index of the entire series here. This segment was originally published on February 4, 2010.

October, and two months in Germany when a high school friend emailed to tell me that he would be in Frankfurt for the night. My mother would be arriving in a few weeks, but this would be my first visitor since moving.

We met at the train station and headed to a pub. I don’t remember where we went or what we drank, but I will never forget how, between drinks and pubs, we came past the Cole’s house. “Let’s go in for a second,” I suggested, excited at the chance to show someone from back home around the set of my strange new life. “I’ll give you a quick tour and we can use the bathroom.”

I showed him the stainless-steel kitchen and the pink-chaired dining room. “Can you believe these chairs?” I asked pointing at the plastic-backed, pink-velor upholstered seats surrounding the long wooden table. “Janet had them specially made.” Lodged in the (plexi?) glass chair backs were fake pink feathers. I had never seen such ugly chairs in my life, and it hurt my head when I thought about how much Janet had probably paid to have them custom made. They seemed to scream “I want you to find me avant gaurd and edgy,” but the execution was sloppy and tasteless, just like the stainless steel faux antlers she’d commissioned for the stairwell we were now walking up.

On the second floor we met Janet and Jens. In bathrobes. Lurking. Angry. “What the hell do you think you’re doing? Who is that?” Jens yelled. “No strangers in the house!”

“What?” I shook my head no. This was news to me.

“NO STRANGERS IN THE HOUSE.” The yell had become a threatening bellow.

“You never told me that before. Besides, this is an old friend of mine. I’ve know him for seven or eight years. I just wanted to show him where I live, he’s not staying, we just wanted to use the bathroom…”

“NO STRANGERS IN THE HOUSE.”

Eyes wide, we turned and scuttled back down the stairs and out the door.

“What the hell was that about?”

“Apparently I”m not allowed to bring friends over.” So much for the affectionate monologues Janet held when she was in a good mood about me being “part of the family.”

The next morning Jens found me in the kitchen. He wanted to talk. “It’s very important that you don’t bring anyone into the house.”

“Ok, that’s fine,” I conceded, “But it would have been nice if someone had told me that before embarrassing me in front of an old friend. I’ve known him for years. He wasn’t just some guy that I picked up at the disco. And he speaks German, so he understood everything you two said. You didn’t exactly make him feel welcome.”

“Well, maybe I should tell you a story. I used to be in banking. A few years ago I was hired to run this bank, and, well, once I had a look through the books it seemed clear that something fishy was going on. I called the police. Twelve people went to jail, and I get worried sometimes…”

He pulled his cell phone out of his pocket and pulled up the speed dial directory to show me the first number. “That’s why I have the police on my first speed dial. For a while we were worried that someone would try to kidnap the children. I’m sure you don’t know what it’s like to walk down a dark street and fear for your life every time you see another person coming in the distance, but that’s how I feel every night.”

Sure, Jens. No woman has ever felt that before. I nodded, wondering why a man with so much to lose would hire a complete stranger to drive his Porsche and take his 4-year-old twins to the park. Maybe I had been hired to kidnap them, Mr. Jens, ever thought of that? And even if I hadn’t been, what was one apathetic, underpaid au pair going to do to stop someone who did?

“Now I can’t get a job in the banking world anymore,” he admitted sadly. “I’ve been working for Janet’s father ever since.”

Later I Googled the case in search of more details. I had Googled the family name before coming to work for them, but without banking-specific keywords I hadn’t found anything about the Cole’s dirty little secret. There wasn’t much to find, but there were a few articles about a sketchy court case involving suspected embezzling, a tattling CEO, and some leniently interpreted Swiss banking laws.

After that, the drama of daily life in the Cole house started to seem absurd, hilarious. A Choose-Your-Own-Adventure, live-action afternoon soap broadcast right to my living room, dining room, bedroom, and kitchen.

A lot of Click Clack Gorilla readers want to know more about moving to Germany.  About to take the same journey themselves (or trying to match dreams with realities) they (you!) write to me with questions about visas and salaries and job oppurtunites.  I’ve done a FAQ about moving to Germany to answer all of the questions about how I got here and how I got a visa and a job and a place to live.  And here comes the FAQ for the folks who want to come over to teach English.

How did you find a teaching job?

I came back to Germany after a two-month visit to the States, and I started throwing resumes at everything that moved.  Which is to say that I looked up English-language schools in the yellow pages and sent a resume and cover letter (in English) to every single one.  In a big city like Frankfurt, that turned out to be somewhere between 20 and 30.  Two called back: a language school at which I got an interview but no job and inlingua, where I taught for some time.

Before returning to Germany I also had a lead on a job at a start-up language school that I also taught at briefly, but which turned out to be a waste of time with more classes canceled than taught (and paid for).

What kind of experience do you have?  Do I need a TEFL to get hired?

Attention all native English speakers with a college degree: you will not need TEFL, or any other certificate, to get hired.  You need to be personable and a meticulous speaker of English.  Seriously.  That’s all.  (While this is probably not true for every language school, it seems to be true of all the franchises.)

My personal English-classroom-door-opening qualifications include my BA in English Lit and a few years spent tutoring college kids in writing at my college’s writing center where I ended up the head tutor of the ESL division during my senior year.  See?  No teaching certificates, no relevant degree (though it may have English in the title, I promise, being able to analyze a novel will get you nowhere in front of a business English class), and no real teaching experience.

Do I need to be able to speak German?

Absolutely not.  In fact, since most language schools encourage the trial-by-fire method (aka teaching students only in the target language for ultimate furstration, I mean absorption), you will be strictly forbidden to speak it.  Although I occasionally bent the rules with true beginners and students who were utterly lost on subjects of grammar, which was admittedly helpful.

What was the job like, day-to-day?

Most English classes, particularly those of the business English variety, are held before or after office hours.  Which means you’ll usually have to get up early for an 8 o’clock class, and then will have the day free before teaching a second class at 5 or 6.  This irritated the hell out of me—I prefer to get all of my working out of the way at once instead of having it drag me out of bed far too early only to spit me back out after an hour and a half with eight more hours to feel anxious about my next class.

Once in a while I taught daytime numbers that involved four hours with the same group of apathetic adults.  And those irritated me even more.  My favorites were one-on-one classes where I would either go to a student’s home or meet her in a cafe and spend the hour and a half chatting, correcting, and role playing.  You’d be amazed how many people are interested in practicing small talk.  Usually classes were in student’s homes or offices, but once in a while I would teach in the company’s classrooms.

At inlingua, teachers are supplied with all the course material, so all you have to do is figure out a vague lesson plan and follow the dotted lines.  It’s a method that leaves a lot of room for both laziness and creativity.  (And also means you can teach someone how to talk about accounting in English without having a clue about accounting yourself.)

Was it hard to make ends meet?  How much do you get paid? 

Not at all, though of course you should remember that I am a pretty lo-fi person.  I was a very dedicated dumpster diver at the time, though not because I didn’t have the money to buy food.  My main expenses were my apartment (300 euros/month including utilities), health insurance (126 euros/month), and beer (a beer in a bar in Frankfurt is expensive at between 2.50—if you’re lucky—and sky’s the limit, which is why I usually bought mine at the supermarket and drank with friends in the park).  I worked about 20 hours a week and had money to spare at a rate of 18 euros/teaching hour (a teaching hour is actually just 45 minutes).  But!  Don’t forget that as a freelancer, which is how most English teachers are billed, have to foot their own insurance and taxes, so we are talking a pre-tax number here.

Pros?

A sweet hourly rate for talking to what usually turned out to be very interesting people (and seeing their homes and offices) and a lot of free coffee.  Every day was totally different, which kept things from getting too ho-hum.  Oh, and when a student cancels a class same-day, you don’t have to work, but you get paid anyway.

Cons?

Weird hours, Saturday classes (four hour blocks blarg!), dress code, apathetic students.

Do you still teach English?

Hell no.  While I loved teaching one-on-one lessons, I don’t have the energy to stand in front of rooms full of apathetic adults who expect to learn English and be entertained on a regular basis.  I much prefer freelance writing, where I don’t need to be “on” ever and can work at home in messy hair and dirty pajamas.

If any of you have any more questions, include them in the comments and I’ll answer them there (and include them in future FAQs).

Those of you who have been reading for a while will remember the au pair chronicles—a serial about how it is that I ended up in Germany and what it was like spending 10 months au pairing for a insanely rich family in Frankfurt am Main. Well, I’ve been busy writing new installments to share with you during operation whirlwind baby. But since a hell of a lot of new readers have become regulars since I first began the series a year ago, I thought I would start by re-publishing the series thus far—both to buy me baby time and to get everyone caught up before continuing the saga. You can find an index of the entire series here. This segment was originally published on January 27, 2010.

Eight months had passed before a question started to form in her mind, becoming more and more urgent as she met each of my parents in turn and, while playing at the role of kindly host mother, started learning more about my life. And the question was this: what the hell is this woman doing working for me?

One afternoon in the kitchen she asked, delicately avoiding the fact that this was really a question about class, about privilege. It was a question she never would have asked Maria— who she knew would have been fucked without her job cleaning Janet’s toilets—or Anna—who had spent her entire working life raising Janet’s children.

Anna and Maria might have fit neatly into Janet’s idea of “hired help” because neither had been to college or had any “professional” work experience. But I came from middle-class privilege, she knew now, and had a college degree from a fancy schmancy college. This meant that I had the qualifications and the connections to be working at what she would have called “a real job”—and yet I was playing hide-and-go-seek and wiping four-year-old ass. Neither did my story mirror the stories of her previous au pairs or those of her friends, many of whom had taken the job in hopes of finding a permanent way out of a bad situation at home.

But me? I was, as far as she could tell, doing this for fun, and this must have been confusing: after all, these were her children, and she wasn’t even raising them “for fun.”

“So why is it you wanted this job anyway?” She was wiping down the stainless steel counter tops when she asked, and I was picking at the leftovers from lunch.

“I’m a writer,” I told her, a little surprised at the question, sure we’d discussed this during both of my interviews. “I wanted to get into travel writing and improve my foreign language skills, and in order to do that I needed to travel. I thought this job would be an interesting way to get to know a new country. I know a lot of people who got their fix studying abroad, but I think you experience a lot more of a culture’s nuances when you live with a family.” (Admission: there is no way that this is what I actually said because I still have no clue how to say the word “nuance” in German, and my German now is a trillion times better than it was then. But I said something like it.) Never mind my political and philosophical reasons for abandoning corporate life. That wasn’t a conversation I felt Janet and I’s relationship was ready for.

She nodded slowly, absorbing the words. Writer. Writer? “Have you been published?” She sounded like she was trying to sound nonchalant, but something like fear was creeping into her eyes.

“Yeah I have actually. I co-authored a little guide book about the college I went to, did some newspaper articles, a few things on the internet.” She stopped wiping and looked at me. Recognition flashed in her eyes, and for the first time since we’d met it felt like she was actually looking at me. It had never occurred to me that someone might feel unnerved by my profession. But writing is about communication, and maintaining one face for private use and one for public use is about keeping secrets.

“But you’d never write about us would you?” Suddenly she was slathering every syllable in the syrupy, artificial tone she used for socializing, for her public face. Suddenly she was remembering ever soap-operatic family story she’d ever told me.

But I have a syrupy “social” voice of my own, and I lied right to her face, just as she had when she’d told me that of course I would be paid for overtime. “Of course not,” I said. “Never.” Liar, liar pants on fire.

I have a few words of advice for you, dear readers, and heed them or be damned: never trust a writer who you’ve just spent eight months treating, well, let’s just say “not as an equal.” Then again, maybe I didn’t lie, but just avoided the question with a shrug, and left the room. Memory changes details. There is no such thing as non-fiction.

Today, thinking back on that conversation, I wondered what Janet would think if she were to read the things I write about my year working for her (extremely pissed off). And for the good times, because there were a few of them and it could always be worse, I’ve changed enough names and details to keep them anonymous. Perhaps they wouldn’t even recognize themselves. Because Janet could be so many people, really, and my story is one of thousands just like it.

Those of you who have been reading for a while will remember the au pair chronicles—a serial about how it is that I ended up in Germany and what it was like spending 10 months au pairing for a insanely rich family in Frankfurt am Main. Well, I’ve been busy writing new installments to share with you during operation whirlwind baby. But since a hell of a lot of new readers have become regulars since I first began the series a year ago, I thought I would start by re-publishing the series thus far—both to buy me baby time and to get everyone caught up before continuing the saga. You can find an index of the entire series here. This segment was originally published on January 18, 2010.

When Janet wasn’t behind her desk, she was wiping the stainless steel counters in the kitchen. The illusion of activity. Wipe the counters so you don’t feel guilty about paying someone else to wipe the toilets, the floors, the windows, and her children. Before lunch, I could often be found behind one of these counters drinking espresso after espresso in preparation for the afternoon of play. Anna would be behind the stove preparing lunch, and Janet flitted around sponge (or coffee) in hand.

That afternoon, we were talking about vegetarianism. I had come to Germany a vegetarian, which Janet seemed to find shocking and exotic. I had gone vegetarian about a year before, after reading Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation. I had been reading La Ninja’s PETA magazines since I was eleven and was horrified by the images I saw there, but I had always been partial to meat and had never felt like any action I could take would mean anything. Schlosser’s final chapter gave me a little pat on the back and said “Individuals can change things.”

So I decided to give up meat, to try the “vote with my dollar” approach to protest. I didn’t like the way animals were treated throughout the factory farming process, and I didn’t like the way that the humans working in the slaughterhouses were treated. Classic reasons for going vegetarian I suppose. But there was something else that bothered me even more so: a feeling of disconnection. At the grocery store I could buy a piece of beef in a sterile Styrofoam bed and never be even remotely reminded, or connected to, the fact that this plastic-wrapped piece of flesh had once been a part of a wet-nosed cow. I didn’t see anything morally wrong with the concept of eating meat, but I saw something terribly wrong with being so disconnected from the life that gave me life.

At the time I was certain I would eat meat again one day (a day which arrived in 2011). It was largely an exercise in appreciation, in reconnection to the real (and by that I mean physical) world. Could I have killed a fish? A cow? A pig? I didn’t know, but these were things I wanted to think about before eating another hamburger.

Back in the kitchen, behind the stainless-steel counters, Janet was telling me about an article about various kinds of vegetarianism that she had just read. “Apparently there are people called vegans who don’t eat any cheese at all,” Janet informed me, shaking her head. “I couldn’t imagine that. No cheese!” She shook her head again.

The night before I had finished reading Vegan: The New Ethics of Eating by Erik Marcus and had decided that as a vegetarian, I was doing a pretty half-assed job at boycotting the meat industry. Who do you think owns the milk and the cheese companies? I had never thought about it before, but—big surprise—it’s the same companies factory farming meat. I had been kind of nervous about breaking the news to Janet (part of your payment as an au pair is room and board, so I needed to inform her). Here was my chance.

“Actually, I was thinking that I would like to become vegan,” I said quietly, looking into my espresso.

“WHAT?” Now, I don’t like to use all caps much in my writing, but this was an all-caps response. “Are you serious?” She was obviously agitated.

“Yeah, well I just finished reading this book, and well…”

“Oh my god, I can’t believe this. Did you hear that Anna? This girl is crazy! No cheese! None!”

“It doesn’t have to be a big inconvenience. If we’re eating something for lunch that I can’t eat I can cook something for myself.”

“What about milk?”

“No. No dairy products at all.”

At that moment, Jens came into the kitchen. It was the rare afternoon that he joined us for lunch. “Jens, Nikki just told us that she’s going vegan.”

“ARE YOU FUCKING CRAZY?!” He actually said that, exactly that, in English. When I tell you these stories, I’m translating all the dialogue. Just imagine little subtitles playing under people speaking German as you read. Except for this moment, which he both translated and yelled. I wasn’t expecting it to be such a shock, but the Cole’s couldn’t imagine their lives without cheese or apparently even sharing a roof with someone willing to go without it.

Those of you who have been reading for a while will remember the au pair chronicles—a serial about how it is that I ended up in Germany and what it was like spending 10 months au pairing for a insanely rich family in Frankfurt am Main. Well, I’ve been busy writing new installments to share with you during operation whirlwind baby. But since a hell of a lot of new readers have become regulars since I first began the series a year ago, I thought I would start by re-publishing the series thus far—both to buy me baby time and to get everyone caught up before continuing the saga. You can find an index of the entire series here. This segment was originally published on January 15, 2010.

“We’d like to see you in the office, Nikki.”

Jens had called from the stairs and turned back as abruptly as he had come, startling me out of the book I had been reading in my room. Flashback to high school, middle school, elementary school: getting called to the office was never a good thing. I scanned my memories of the last two weeks. Had I fucked up? Not that I could remember. The twins hadn’t even behaved particularly badly.

I put down my book and hurried down to the office where Janet was waiting behind her desk, her husband seated on the couch across from the door.

“You guys wanted to see me?”

“Yes we did. We thought it was time for you to start driving.” Up to that point Janet had always driven to the kindergarten. I came along and brought the twins inside while she idled on the curb outside. Once I took over the driving she could get back to doing more of whatever it was that she was always doing behind her computer, and I would have another few centimeters of independence.

Driving sounds good, I thought. Images of the family’s cars flashed through my head—Porsche, Fiat, Ferrari, Mercedes, Mini-Cooper, BMW—followed by images of myself, wrapped in a blanket and bleeding from a head wound as police and EMS workers bustled around me in slow motion and I contemplated the 100,000 car I’d just totaled. My forehead wrinkled. “Wait. What am I going to be driving?”

“The Porsche of course,” Jens cried, springing up and putting on his cap. “There isn’t anything else.” He tossed me a key ring with one black key attached. “Let’s go for a test drive.”

A typical stereotype of German people is that they are auto-philes, and Jens was the embodiment of the stereotype. He collected cars, had Mr. Walters meticulously wash and wax the collection regularly, dabbled in amateur car racing, and had adorned the walls of his sitting room—a niche of leather couches and untouched coffee table books outside of my bedroom—with framed photographs of famous car racers. All in all, I think it would be safe to say that he spent more time with his cars than he did with his children.

Now, sitting in the passenger seat of the Porsche and obviously excited, Jens was telling me to pull out of the garage and asking me about the cars I had driven in America. We drove around the block a few times, and I parallel parked in a narrow space near the twin’s school, thanking the gods of fortune that I had learned to drive on a stick shift. “So far so good,” Jens said as I slid into the spot. “Let’s go on the autobahn.”

The autobahn, contrary to popular belief, does occasionally have a speed limit, though these limits are much, much higher than those generally found beside American highways. We drove a few exits out of the city, and Jens urged me to go faster and faster.

“Come on! You’ve got to see what this baby can do!” This, the man who was supposed to be testing whether I could safely transport his children to kindergarten and back. When our exit came, I slowed. A little blue Peugot was coming up behind us, and I was going to let it pass before merging into the exit lane.

“What the hell are you doing!??!” Jens shouted, slamming a hand down onto the black dashboard. “This is a Porsche. The Porsche always goes first. Hit the gas, cut them off!” This, the man who was supposed to be testing whether I could safely transport his children to kindergarten and back.

Was he serious? Was this a test? I glanced at his face, and his eyes said “serious,” “obsessed,” and “possibly insane.” I sped up and left the little blue car behind us.

This is part two of a series about how, in another life, I was an au pair. You can read part one here. An index of the whole series lives here. It was originally published on December 28, 2009.

Left

I spent my last week in America painting rooms in the house that my mother had bought that summer. During my sophomore year of college she had moved to upstate New York, and I hadn’t been back to my hometown since. Who was left there to visit? My former piano teacher, but was he still alive? My ex-non-step siblings? There must be someone left there who I once knew, but who?

My college friends went home for the summer at the end of each school year. I went to visit my mom in New York and my dad in New Jersey, but home had already become a relative concept. Home was where my books were, where ever I was, in whatever apartment I was staying in at the time. There was an apartment-above-the-garage outside of Saratoga Springs where I spent a summer working as a live-in part-time babysitter for three sweet, dull accountant’s children. There was an apartment-above-the-garage in Vermont with my freshman-year roommate and her family. There was a series of boxy white-walled rooms in college dormitories.

My senior year of college, I had moved into an apartment downtown with two friends. The bedrooms were barely bigger than the mattresses on their floors, but the kitchen, dining room, and living room were spacious, high-ceilinged. Our landlady was an eccentric junk-sculptor who spent the summers in Saratoga and the winters somewhere in New Jersey. During the summer the scent of her chain-smoked cigarettes seeped through the wall I shared with the one-room shanty she had tacked onto the back of the house.

During the winter we had peace and the junkman sculpture looming quietly from her little porch. We also had the “jungle” mural she’d painted on every wall of the smallest bedroom. Green streaks smeared the walls, flames (or parrots?) adorned their crowns. A monkey sprawled directly above the bed, arms reaching, eye sockets two empty brown gouges in the plaster ceiling.

Now I was moving to Germany where I would live with the family I’d be working for. A dangerous arrangement no matter what the job. But I didn’t think about what I was doing. I painted, and at 3 am the night before my flight I packed: clothing and supplies laid out on the bed and hastily thrown into two suitcases. I wasn’t leaving home. I was taking it with me. When the concept of home stopped being a static, unmovable place, I got to know it as something flexible and moving: something I could have as much of as I needed as long as I didn’t try to nail it down.

We drove out to Newark, I got on the red-eye flight to Frankfurt, one-way ticket in hand, and I woke up in Frankfurt am Main.

And so another week of Fastnacht (aka Karnival aka Fasching aka German Mardi Gras) begins.  Today is what folks ’round here call “Altweiber” which literally means “old woman” but refers to one of the opening Fastnacht celebrations.  Basically if you’re a lady you’re allowed to cut off the tie of anyone you find wearing one.  And as much as I don’t really get into this holiday, that sounds like fun to me.  (Note to self: get some wild hoard of activists together to storm a tie-heavy office full of people doing evil things next Altweiber.)

Usually I avoid the city like it’s been infested by plague victims when Fastnacht comes around.  As a holiday, its main focus is getting huge crowds together to listen to bad music in cheap costumes while consuming as much beer as possible.  Many aspects of this are appealing.  But not the crowds, dear cod, not the crowds, who are, depending on your timing, in various shades of really fucking drunk.  I don’t like big crowds, and I like them even less when they are drunken and dressed as circus clowns.  A lot of people really really like this combination, however.  Which I guess explains why you get the crowds in the first place.  It also explains why nine months later, there’s usually a little baby boom.

Fastnacht, like pretty much every holiday I have ever heard of, has roots in some sort of pagan-y celebration of something or other.  I can’t remember what (the Beard told me this morning) and having just spent the morning researching this exact subject for work, I can’t be bothered now, on my time off, to actually look into the facts.  In Mainz the event also has a strong “fuck you French occupiers” tradition, which means that the government gets mocked a lot during Fastnacht (and another point for the holiday!).  Oh and Mainz is one of Germany’s three Fastnacht capitals (the others being Cologne and Düsseldorf), which means that if you live down town and are a Fastnacht Grinch, you are totally fucked.

Rose Monday (also known as Peanut’s due date, and dear sweet cod do not let her be a Rose Monday baby) is another big day in the festivities.  There’s a parade that I’ve never seen, and an even bigger crowd than the one I encountered this afternoon around the Fastnachtsbrunnen (the Fastnacht Fountain—that’s how much Mainz loves this holiday) when I—against my better judgement—went into town to take a few pictures for a blog for work (some of which you are seeing on this post, others of which you can view there).

Up on the hill where our community is located, you could go an entire Fastnacht without realizing that the holiday is even taking place.  (For this I am thankful.)  On the bus that took me down into the center of town, there was a lone fool in a colorful hat (no bells gracing its peak, but a disco ball).  I began to worry that there might be nothing around to photograph, which makes me the biggest Fastnacht fool of all.  Off the bus I began to see more wigs, more hats, more painted faces.  And by the time I had gotten to Schillerplatz and the fountain, I was surrounded by lady bugs and cookie monsters and monks and witches and pirates and clowns and every animal in the encyclopedia.  Mario and Luigi were there, as well as a woman wearing a model of the Mainzer Dom (cathedral) on her head.

Several hundred people were packed in between a large stage and city hall, singing along to the Fastnacht songs being played (lip synced?) on stage.  But the crowd was manageable (not like it will be on Rose Monday or any evening this weekend), perfect for costume watching.  From my perch on the crowd’s rim I watched a group of bears smoking cigarettes while a walking barrel and a large bird stood with heads close together in heated discussion.