By Carina Fossati
If one year ago somebody had said that I would be working with kids -and enjoining it madly- nobody will have believed it. But I spent the last four month working as an au-pair and I am sure that this job gave me the opportunity of understanding the kiwi culture better than any other job I could have taken, plus giving me a lot of knowledge about children -something useful If one day I decide to be a mother.
I am a journalist and after five years writing for a magazine in my home country, Uruguay, I decided to take one gap year just to travel, find new experiences and write about them in my blog (www.hillstoheels.com). Our home tongue is Spanish, so I thought that the ideal was to choose a country were English were the language spoken -this is the language I use when I interview international artists, so improving my vocabulary and pronunciation would be something very useful for my job. Lots of friends recommended me to come to New Zealand. Every year 200 Uruguayan citizens between 18 and 35 years get a New Zealand `s working holiday visa, and in 2011 I turned in one of this lucky ones.
To avoid the temptation of talking all the time in Spanish I decided to live with a kiwi family instead of moving with Uruguayan and Argentinian friends. This would be, I told myself, a short-cut in my immersion inside the kiwi culture and habits.