Cúrdula´s Experience as Au Pair in Barcelona

We can unfortunately no longer accept further applications at the moment. You can find a list of Au Pair agencies in Spain at www.agenciasaupairaepa.es who will be happy to help you.

I’m now in Spain since 8 month and I’m very pleased with my host family. Looking back to the first days over here I had some trouble getting used to the new environment. I had to talk a foreign language, I had to get to use to a new climate, new people, a new daily routine, new food and a lot more things that were totally new for me. The good thing about it was that my host family constantly supported me in getting through all of that.

 

They introduced me to people they know to help me finding friends and by the way I have a lot of free time to meet them. In addition they supported me finding a school to get into a language class. I actually wanted to study some castellan but in the end I decided to participate a catalan class because nearly everyone here talks catalan even if they also know to talk in castellan. My family always talked to me in castellan because I basically wanted to learn this language but I automatically learned both languages.

Moreover my Spanish family showed me all the famous and beautiful places over here in Barcelona, Mataró and Argentona. That was very useful for me because I needed to orientate in all the unknown places. At the beginning they took me to the places by car until I knew the cities, then I took public transport to for example get to Mataró to language class.

But the most important thing is that I made an incredible experience carrying for the little girl, named Clara. She is 4 years old and a very lively person. My daily routine is clothing her in the morning and preparing her breakfast. Her mother always takes her to school in the morning and later at 12:30 o’clock I pick her up from school and prepare her dinner. At 15:00 o’clock I usually take her back to school where I have to pick her up again at 16:30 o’clock. Some days she also has some after school activities like dancing, music or gymnastics from 5 to 6 o’clock.

At the weekends I usually have free time to go out and meet friends, even if sometimes I have to stay home to look after Clara when they have plans. But all in all I have a settled daily routine and time for myself and if I had plans that didn’t fit in that routine it never posed a problem to arrange things differently.

I had an incredible time looking after Clara because she is a very lovely and happy child who needs a lot of attention and love and I enjoyed giving that to her. For me it has been amazing getting introduced to her small world and I’m lucky to building now a part of it.

Summing up I can totally recommend going abroad doing an Au-pair year because it’s a unique opportunity to collect some incredible experiences and memories. But above all I’m lucky living in such a loving and adorable family. From the first day on I felt warmly welcomed by family and friends and they gave me a second home over here in Spain.