Grounded

I finally feel a bit grounded, thank god. At last I feel like I'm with a family I will be able to stay with for the next 9 months (well, I am supposedly meant to stay until March, but they can't do anything about it if I want to leave in January). Uni starts on 16 February, and I have to say possibly the most important thing to come out of this gap year so far has been my decision to do international relations/law at ANU instead of international studies/journalism at UNSW. If I had gone with my initial choice, I would very likely have regretted it by now.

I have about 50 minutes before I need to leave and get the kids. The kids are actually pretty good. Ale is a bit difficult sometimes and can be a pain in the ass, but in the end he knows the limits and still listens to me and does as he is told. The good thing about this family is that the mum herself doesn't seem to be totally that interested in her kids (by this I mean more as in isn't as obsessed as Anja was), so she can hardly expect me to be that interested either.

Meeting the former au pair, Z, was certainly interesting. Definitely not what I expected. I think she is around 23 or 24, and is totally crazy (not necessarily in a bad way, just crazy). She's done probably all the drugs under the sun and I had to sit there and listen to her take on all of them. She drinks and smokes quite a lot (so did K, the mum, to my surprise, but only outside and only occasionally). She hates cocaine and the date rape drug, whatever the proper name for that is. She likes smoking pot and she likes ecstasy. Apparently pot and ecstasy are the most common drugs in Berlin, and things like heroin and ice aren't as popular. She goes out and parties until like 5:30am in the morning, and then plays the role of au pair several hours later which is kind of insane but surprisingly enough she wasn't too bad at her job because she lasted 10 months and then quit for personal reasons because she was drinking too much under stress or something. She's bi and one of those artsy partiers. She did a degree on creative writing and ancient Greece, and now has no idea what she wants to do in life which kind of freaks me out. Proof, I guess, of why studying something you enjoy is not necessarily a good thing. To be honest If I were in my mid twenties and au pairing, I would feel kind of lost too.

 Guess it was kind of naïve of me, but I really didn't realise Berlin was such a big party place. Z showed me all the best clubs or whatever online, and it all seems so wild. Apparently everyone does drugs and you see people having sex in random corners all the time.

But she also said she fell in love with Berlin and that it's her favourite place in the world.

We'll see about that. I'm really hoping this year works out for the better.