Hello, Paris - Bye, Paris :(

Hello guys!

A friend of mine has spent ten months as an au pair in Irleand and just came back a few days ago. She told me about her great "year", her amazing host family and beautiful Ireland. I was so jealous, to be honest. Everytime somebody tells his/her stories of staying abroad I have to think about my own try at spending a year somewhere else.
I wanna tell you the whole drama, let's go ;)
(Just to make it clear, I don't want to frighten anyone or do the au pair thing down because for many many people it was the best time of their life. I just want to share an experience with you. The experience that it can go wrong.)

After having passed the leaving certificate I decided to go to Vienna in order to study there. At first it seemed to be the perfect city and I was so happy to be independant and "alone" in Vienna. However, after one year of studying two different courses of studies, arguing with my flatmates and working here and there I had to admit that Vienna wasn't the right place for me. At least at this time of my life. Back in Styria I worried my brain. How could I shape my future? I didn't want to study something new again. So, I got over my biggest fear and went to Paris in order to spend there a year as an au pair. I had found my host family on my own, without an agency or something like that because I didn't want to pay something except my flight. There is this website where you can set up your profile and look through the family profiles. Once you have found an appropriate family you can get in contact. In this way I found this (supposedly) nice family which offered all I had dreamed of. They live in the heart of Paris (in an affluent neighbourhood), have a dog, two children AND they own a castle. It sounded like a dream. Added to this, I found out that the mother was born in Austria and has married a French guy. It sounded perfect to me.
When I arrived in Paris however, I was knocked out of the skies. As they had promised me I got my own flat, but it was really tiny, messy and the furniture was falling apart. All in all, it was totally  unhygienic and just terrible. I tried to be cool about that and said to myself that I just had to bring my little place to heel. (Wasn't that easy regarding the enormous pile of wall plaster on my floor which was growing every hour.^^ There had been a water-pipe burst prior to my arrival)
The next day I met the kids for the first time. They were so uneducated and unbehaved as I've never seen it before. The apartment of this family was an absolute mess, it was unbelievable. Not a single time I was able to eat with them as the cutlery and the plates were completely unhygienic. I couldn't believe my ears when they told me that I had to wash the kids' hair only every couple of weeks. The same with changing their clothes. I was speechless.
Every day with the two youngsters (8 and 10 years old) was a fight. I am pretty sure that I am able to handle kids because I always had to look after the children of relatives and friends. These two kids however, were terrible. They basically did the opposite of what I told them to do. They ignored me, they yelled at me and they even ran away in the middle of the street. It was a disaster!
I would have been able to stick it out if there had not been another really important fact: It was required from me to speek solely German with the kids. I decided to switch family because I was not willing to spend a year under horrible circumstances while making no progress in speaking French.
However, finding another family wasn't as easy as I had thought. Most of them already had an au pair girl and others wanted me to speak English. I was desperate. After three weeks I told the family that I wasn't happy at all and that I wanted to leave them because I didn't get enough opportunities to speak French.What happened next was like a volcanic outburst. She yelled at me how egoistic I was and that I wasn't allowed to leave and so on. The next two days she was ignoring me and set up the kids against me. She accused me of just having exploited her family. Her husband who had been in Egypt at this time was assailing me with phone calls the whole night. I really had enough.
The next day in the morning the concierge knocked on my door and told me that I had to leave the flat by midday. I really was kicked out! By the concierge! When he saw how angry I was he told me that he wasn't surprised at all because in the last two years he got to know 16 different au pair girls who wanted to work for this family and who left after some weeks.
So, I took my luggage and went to the bus station where I met the German mother who has been very nice to me for the last three weeks. I told her my story. She was so angry but told me the same story as the concierge because she knew the family as well. I wanted to spent a night at the airport and take the next flight home but this nice mum invited me to stay with her that night. I was unbelievably happy and grateful!
The next morning I took a flight home to MY FAMILY.
Of course I was incredibly happy to be at home again but nevertheless I was sad and disappointed that my wonderfully imagined year has transformed into three awful weeks, even today.