Tuesday 29 November 2011

Babysitter drives a hard bargain


My first few weeks living in the centre of town were spent walking around and deciding which café to sip coffee at next. That was in between my babysitting duties of course. My first job after arriving in Dijon was looking after the children of the director of the lab that Michael was working at. It was a nice gesture to help me occupy my time while I was without work. I soon discovered that at 5 euros an hour it wasn’t such a nice gesture.

The boys, Felix and Victor were 7 and 3 years old. The parents both worked, as is common in France I noticed, and were hardly ever home together during the week. I found it a bit odd that a couple would have kids and not see them very often but I’ve been told that’s very common throughout the world. I guess it’s my upbringing.

Anyway, I would pick these kids up from school in the afternoon around 5pm and sometimes take them to school in the morning. On Wednesdays I often looked after Victor before he started going to the daycare centre at the university. Then they paid me pittance to spend half an hour on the bus taking him there. And remember that the father went to work at the university every Wednesday too. It wasn’t like he couldn’t take his kids himself. Maybe it was all part of the nice gesture thing.

I absolutely loved the kids. I actually got to be a kid again myself (except when cooking with hot water - very dodgy with a 7 y.o who wants to help). And despite what the father said about lazing on the side of the pool at the Cap Vert water centre while Felix amused himself in the wave pool, I didn’t. Maternal instinct told me to be observant with little kids at a swimming pool and so I followed him around incessantly in case he should fall or drown (he consequently kept moving from pool to pool). I spent every hour that I was with the boys playing their childhood games in French and I learned the rules of soccer (le foot) and basketball (le basket) in French too.

But the French of games wasn’t the only French I learned. I thought of my time playing with these kids as valuable French language learning time. From Felix I learned the current French being tossed around the primary school playground. Words that cannot be repeated in polite company and definitely not in front of the parents. I, of course, was a babysitter loyal to her 7-year-old boss and never told his parents about the bad language he’d employed in my company (obviously I wasn’t polite company).

From 3-year-old Victor the story is a bit different. Bad language was rarely used at home and he was too young to understand that it was bad. That is, until he started going to Maternelle (pre-school but in the same school as the primary kids). I was flabbergasted one day to hear him say ‘Pipi Caca Merde!’ (Wee, Poo, Shit!). I ignored him at first (I wasn’t his mother) and tried not to laugh because it really is funny to hear little ones try to shock you with their naughty words. In the end though, he let the words slip during dinner with Mummy and he got into big trouble. After that, whenever he repeated the words, I got angry, to no effect of course – I wasn’t his mother!

Victor wasn’t all bad. I realised just how young and fragile he was one day when we were walking past a building site on the way to the park. Two beefy guys were digging up the dirt with a big tractor thingy (bulldozer?) and then depositing it in the trucks. Victor stopped to watch (his favourite toy was a tractor thingy that digs up dirt). After a few minutes I noticed he was facing the opposite way to the work that was going on. I asked him what he was doing and he replied, (read out loud in a very high-pitched voice) 'Je regarde le mur' - I'm looking at the wall. I asked him why (secretly laughing because he was so cute!)? He replied very seriously, 'Parce que j'ai peur' - Because I'm scared. I was confused so I asked him to repeat what he’d said, thinking that maybe I had misunderstood the French bit. ‘Je regarde le mur parce que j'ai peur'. He was scared of the noise the trucks were making and so obviously the thing to do when you’re scared (and 3 years old) is look at the wall! It was so cute and it took all my willpower not to laugh at the poor little guy!!

I’m afraid the language learning might have been a one way thing. I learned a lot but all the boys learned from me was the word ‘oopsidaisy’. It’s the best word to teach a kid of any language, not just French. It’s a nonsense word but is so useful in preventing a kid from launching into a crying saga if he/she falls over or hurts him/herself. I used this ploy with Victor several times and it actually worked. And his parents thought I’d actually taught him some English when he came out with it one rare dinner time that they were all together (little did they know!)! 

I guess they took this as a cue to my being an excellent English teacher because they subsequently asked me to tutor Felix for a week during his summer holidays. It was basically glorified babysitting (and not that glorified really). So I demanded a pay rise. Felix’s father argued back that since I was going to be doing around 35 hours in just one week, I would already be getting lots of money (strange logic). I argued back that teaching deserves some form of extra payment and being a hard woman to bargain with, he acquiesced. I got a whopping 1 euro pay rise. But I guess it gave me an extra big paycheck at the end of the week (again strange logic). Needless to say, as soon as I got a real job I got out of there (although I was sad to say goodbye to the boys).

I quickly realised that I wouldn’t be sitting in cafés sipping cappuccinos all day. The few ‘cappuccinos’ I tried at different places were all the same. A long black coffee topped with whipped cream and a chocolate on the side. Where was the milky coffee with the frothed milk and sprinkling of chocolate on top? I couldn’t believe that they couldn’t make a decent cappuccino in Dijon (according to my professional coffee-drinking standards). I soon discovered that the Dijon idea of a cappuccino was the same as Paris and other towns in France, which was very different to the Australian idea of a cappuccino. So very quickly I adapted to the cappuccino climate change and got used to black coffee. I also noticed that one cappuccino cost twice as much as a petit café (equates to a long short black by Australian standards), which meant that if I bought these instead, I could sit for twice as long at one café and drink twice as many coffees! 

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