A friend from JYM, last year's German exchange program, wrote me the other day. Having graduated at the normal time, she is now faced with the wide wide world and all the possibilities - and naturally, she asked if I had any advice re: moving to Munich.
I do, as it turns out. I have pages. I wrote on and on in response to a one-paragraph question. I hit "send" and watched in horror as my advice filled the screen.
Then I reread it, and it turns out that most of it isn't that bad. It's true that much of it is only applicable to people in exactly my situation (as she is, what with the German boyfriend living in StuSta and so on), but some of it is salvageable for any country anywhere! Not bad for before coffee!
So without further adieu, here it is: my advice to a graduate fleeing the US for another, more refined nation.
"Congratulations on graduating - and yeah, life in Munich is pretty great! It's been sixty degrees for at least a month, the bikers have become less aggressive, and we're about to experience StuStaCulum - the largest student party in Munich - directly in front of our back door. Also, knock on wood, it's rained way less this year. Party time!
Now for the bad news. In my experience, it's super hard to get a job in Germany as a native English speaker without them actually seeing you in person. I think this might be true for any country, but Germany is especially into a personal impression. I feel like they'll only hire you overseas if it's some corporate job for which you are ridiculously qualified. They're like that.
But if you're serious about moving here, why not just do it? As a lucky American, Germany will let you into the country for 3 months to search for jobs. You come in on a tourist visa, a friendly tourist visa that turns into an overstayed evil tourist visa if you're here longer than 90 days without fixing it... but I digress. If you've got money saved, come here, hang out, interview furiously. Don't worry about apartments: live with a friend. Live illegally in a supposedly unoccupied corner of StuSta's Green House. Live in a hostel! It seems risky, but it'll help if you somehow get one of those magical flexible-return-date plane tickets.
Second: what do you want to do? Jobs, here, are both easier and harder to come by than in the US - easier because hello, no economic crisis, no sad middle-aged man beating you out for an entry-level position, but harder because you um don't really speak German as well as you think you do.
So I'd look for jobs that attract native English speakers - both for the obvious reasons and for other, more technical legal ones, which I'll explain in a minute. (Unless you are an engineer or computer genius or have some other valuable skill that transcends language, of course, in which case what am I doing giving you advice? Go do whatever it is you do to get jobs, you well-educated person you, and I, the English major, will continue angrily blogging in her bathrobe while you earn much more money than me.)
In my experience, the absolute easiest-to-get - although shittiest-paying - job is in a bilingual kindergarten or preschool. They are everywhere, and a good way to improve one's German. If you like children at all, have any experience whatsoever, and don't come off as a serial killer in person, do it. The hours can be terrible, but German children are ADORABLE.
Other options:
There is always the good old standby: teaching English. Here in Munich, a freelance teaching visa is (apparently, although I wouldn't know) easy to get. But: you have to have job offers at two schools in order for them to take you seriously at the visa office, and it helps if you have some kind of flimsy TEFL qualification, available online or in an intense and expensive 6-week course somewhere. Another drawback is that you have to be really, really good at doing your own taxes and finding your own health insurance. Also, as in child-caring, the pay is weird, the hours erratic - unless you really love it and are talented at it, of course, in which case you can find a sweet gig at a corporation somewhere.
Then there is my route: nannying. Felicity Nannies - look them up! It's how I found my ridiculously easy job. They're an agency devoted to placing English-speaking nannies in families that want their children exposed to the language. This job will not improve your German, at least if you're me. It may even wither it. However, it may also place you in an elegant mansion with two well-behaved teenagers and bowls of expensive fruit. I'm just saying.
Last of all comes the option I considered first: English-speaking secretarial work. Apparently these jobs can be well-paying, rewarding, and have loads of upward mobility. If you've ever done anything like this before and are really good at wearing suits, hit patent offices and law offices up. They may just need your skills.
None of these are probably what you want to do for the rest of your life. They are, however, good ways of being allowed to stay in Germany - visas are a little hard to come by, especially since your employer has to be able to prove that the job can't be done by an EU citizen. Mine got around it by putting "will instruct our children in the American way of life" on the visa form. I still have no idea what that means, but it worked.
If you want to continue emailing applications before you take the plunge and actually move there, go ahead: just keep in mind that a German employer expects a personalized cover letter, a 2-page CV (WITH education information on it; sources vary on what that means), and a Bewerbungsmappe, which is basically copies of every certificate you have. (Diploma, certifications, immunization records... kidding, but still). So if you want to scan that stuff into your computer, do it it now, before you leave; life will be much easier later. Scan everything, every document you've ever received ever. Germans love documents. Have all of them.
Last of all - you're expected to have health insurance if you're in the country. I'd advise doing what I did: my worried mother bought me a not-very-comprehensive travel healthcare package good for five months, and then when I got a job my employers decided to pay for it, so now I have a shiny card in pinks and yellows with my name on it. Hooray! However, if you're going the freelance route, be aware that you'll have to provide your own, and there are only so many agencies that the Bavarian government finds acceptable... I'd buy one month of travel insurance, then try to find some while you're here.
Best of luck. My advice basically boils down to this: you can fuck things up a lot and you'll still be okay. I never thought they'd let me stay in the country, but look at me now!
Love,
Jessie.
PS, toytowngermany.com. Jobs, apartment, expatriates, angry vitriolic forum rages, funny stuff - all about living in Germany as an expatriate. Just don't spend too much time on it. Oh, how easy it is to spend too much time on it...
Monday, May 16, 2011
Wednesday, March 30, 2011
Die Drehung der Schraube
Gentle reader (i.e. dear friend Keri, assorted relatives),
It has been three months exactly since I arrived in Munich.
And three months is the amount of time an American tourist visa waiver lasts here.
But luckily, I am not on a plane home to St. Paul. No, I am still sitting happily in Studentenstadt - next to me is my passport, open to my fancy new work visa. It is a pink sheet that covers two pages; on one page is a large, intricate block of text, and on the other is a mug-shot of me in which I resemble a lady rapist.
Gentle reader, this visa is good for three years. Three... freaking... years. How did this happen?
I am employed - so employed - by a small, very persistent German woman. She is meticulously dressed, with a well-coiffed bob and tailored clothing - I've taken to calling her Lucille Bluth subconsciously. I cannot tell you her real name, nor the name of the high-profile international company of which she is the German CEO - in my work contract, it says that "the employee agrees not to disclose to any third party any information whatsoever arising from or connected in any way to the employment, including information gleaned by the employee regarding the employer and the employer's family during the course of employment". This blog is probably pushing it.
Still, I cannot keep secret the fact that I am now a governess, or tutor, or nanny, or whatever.
Nor can I conceal the fact that I work for a very, as the nannying agency called it in their newsletter, "high-profile family".
Their house is four stories tall, which is huge for Munich. They have a garden full of manicured, shaped hedges. They have a small gazebo. They have a housekeeper, who is a very kind woman who speaks English with me and shows me repeatedly how to brew a cappuccino in the Nescafe machine.
Yes, a cappuccino. This is a great job, says Nader - says facts.
I am less positive - I am still waiting for the other shoe to drop, because how can I be paid to do this? Daily I bike through the park, past the river, and down cobblestoned streets; I put my key into their front gate and show myself in. There is, as I said, coffee. If I like, I can come an hour early and eat lunch with one of the children and the aforementioned housekeeper. I did, a day ago, and it was delicious, and at the end of it the housekeeper would not let me load the dishwasher.
Ah, yes, the children - there's no catch there, either. They are not squalling babies or tempestuous seven-year-olds -- they are a bespectacled, mild-mannered teenaged boy and a gentle pre-teenaged girl who runs from room to room, skidding in her socks. Both have had multiple British and American au pairs as babies, so they already speak damn good - if rusty - English. (Theoretically, at least on the contract, my job to "instruct them in American culture", which, short of showing them the entirety of The Simpsons, I'm not sure how to do. But, being that they are good listeners, it shouldn't be hard.)
The point is that the whole gig seems much too perfect, especially if you consider what I'm being paid. The zenith is that I don't have to be at work until two, leaving mornings free for making eggs and toast and picnicking in the park.
With any other job, if it had a list of this many pluses and virtually no minuses, I would be happy to accept it at face value. However, there is just too much fiction about nannying to make this possible.
I blame Professor Bradley Deane for my discomfort. In freshman year, around this time of the year, we read The Turn of the Screw. If you don't know, this is a Henry James ghost story, written in 1898, about a young nanny who takes what seems initially to be a perfect assignment. She is at a lovely home in the country with a housekeeper and two obedient, beautiful children. But then slowly creepy stuff happens, she starts seeing ghostly figures, she learns that the previous nanny died on the premises, she becomes steadily more creeped out by the housekeeper, she winds up strangling the boy.... etcetera etcetera.
Thank you, Bradley Deane. Because of your class, I walk up and down the spiral staircase of the house, on my guard, watching out for the ghosts of previous au pairs who had affairs with the gardener and experienced an angelic fall. I attempt to concentrate on other, more cheery nanny fiction - The Sound of Music would seem a more appropriate choice, Salzburg is like an hour and a half away even - but still, I must be wary.
If I find out that a previous nanny was named Anything Jessel, I'm totally out of there, biking as fast as I can over the scenic cobblestones...
PS, all of this is just to hide how smug I feel. This job totally rocks.
Tuesday, February 22, 2011
Seven Things
Here it is:
Things I Hate in a Novel
1. Long blocks of text full of irregular punctuation and jammed-together words because that's the only way the author knows how to be dramatic. "andhe is touching her and myheadis spinningand oh god how how they are all dead"... COME ON.
2. I hate how, in children's books, characters' parents always have clearly-defined, lucrative occupations. Who does, nowadays? Still, these people: they are Writers, or Doctors, or Artists. For example, in A Wrinkle in Time, Meg Murry's mother is a famous scientist who makes dinner on her Bunsen burner in the lab in their home, doing so while brushing back her long, auburn, perfect hair. Also, COME ON.
3. Similarly: it sucks when characters don't have to worry about money AT ALL, because some deus ex machina god has jumped into the plot and taken care of that for them. For instance, since Meg's family is apparently independently wealthy, even though they are a single-parent household, they do not have to worry about money, more just the fact that her father and genius little brother have been kidnapped by a giant alien brain. Also see: Henry and Clare in The Time Traveler's Wife.
4. Untranslated foreign language in the text, I'm talking to you, dead ERNEST HEMINGWAY. (Unless the character telling the story also can't understand what's going on -- in which case, go ahead.)
5. Intricate science-fiction societies, the governance of which is unnecessarily explained at the beginning of the book. By the same token, elaborately-described machines when a simple plot device would work just as well. H. G. Wells it, don't Jules Verne it! (See: http://beatonna.livejournal.com/125341.html)
6. Combination of 4 and 5: Authorially made-up languages. I know Tolkien is Tolkien, but I'm still annoyed by the audacity of Elvish.
7. Description.
I may have to learn to come to terms with this one.
Things I Like in a Novel
1. Lovable characters who would make terrible friends.
2. Characters who come from a variety of socioeconomic classes, like Mrs. Dalloway and Septimus Smith, even though Virginia Woolf was sort of classist and the novel is still called "Mrs. Dalloway".
3. Thinly-veiled, thoroughly-embellished autobiographical narratives -- I'm looking at you, Jonathan Safran Foer and Marjane Satrapi!
4. Love, but ONLY between two fully-realized three-dimensional characters. (Okay, yes, this is entirely about The Time-Traveler's Wife. Upon my fourth rereading of it, Clare seems less like a human and more like a Disney princess. Either that, or I'm just suspicious of long auburn hair on characters in general.)
5. A bunch of tales woven in and around a central plot (see: anything Neil Gaiman has ever written ever / Jeffery Eugenides' Middlesex).
6. When tragic things happen in funny ways, or when funny things, on a closer look, are tragedies.
7. When the historical is personal, but when the historical doesn't override the growth and importance of the protagonist. Salome is about John the Baptist, but it's also about self-destructive lust; Persepolis is about the Iranian Revolution, but it's really about leaving / returning.
I'm sure there are a billion people out there who disagree with me, especially about the anti-Tolkien bits. If you're reading this, and read books at all, I want to know what your lists look like. They're probably much different than mine, especially if you're Nader, in which case your second list would read "Medical literature" and "Facebook".
Things I Hate in a Novel
1. Long blocks of text full of irregular punctuation and jammed-together words because that's the only way the author knows how to be dramatic. "andhe is touching her and myheadis spinningand oh god how how they are all dead"... COME ON.
2. I hate how, in children's books, characters' parents always have clearly-defined, lucrative occupations. Who does, nowadays? Still, these people: they are Writers, or Doctors, or Artists. For example, in A Wrinkle in Time, Meg Murry's mother is a famous scientist who makes dinner on her Bunsen burner in the lab in their home, doing so while brushing back her long, auburn, perfect hair. Also, COME ON.
3. Similarly: it sucks when characters don't have to worry about money AT ALL, because some deus ex machina god has jumped into the plot and taken care of that for them. For instance, since Meg's family is apparently independently wealthy, even though they are a single-parent household, they do not have to worry about money, more just the fact that her father and genius little brother have been kidnapped by a giant alien brain. Also see: Henry and Clare in The Time Traveler's Wife.
4. Untranslated foreign language in the text, I'm talking to you, dead ERNEST HEMINGWAY. (Unless the character telling the story also can't understand what's going on -- in which case, go ahead.)
5. Intricate science-fiction societies, the governance of which is unnecessarily explained at the beginning of the book. By the same token, elaborately-described machines when a simple plot device would work just as well. H. G. Wells it, don't Jules Verne it! (See: http://beatonna.livejournal.com/125341.html)
6. Combination of 4 and 5: Authorially made-up languages. I know Tolkien is Tolkien, but I'm still annoyed by the audacity of Elvish.
7. Description.
I may have to learn to come to terms with this one.
Things I Like in a Novel
1. Lovable characters who would make terrible friends.
2. Characters who come from a variety of socioeconomic classes, like Mrs. Dalloway and Septimus Smith, even though Virginia Woolf was sort of classist and the novel is still called "Mrs. Dalloway".
3. Thinly-veiled, thoroughly-embellished autobiographical narratives -- I'm looking at you, Jonathan Safran Foer and Marjane Satrapi!
4. Love, but ONLY between two fully-realized three-dimensional characters. (Okay, yes, this is entirely about The Time-Traveler's Wife. Upon my fourth rereading of it, Clare seems less like a human and more like a Disney princess. Either that, or I'm just suspicious of long auburn hair on characters in general.)
5. A bunch of tales woven in and around a central plot (see: anything Neil Gaiman has ever written ever / Jeffery Eugenides' Middlesex).
6. When tragic things happen in funny ways, or when funny things, on a closer look, are tragedies.
7. When the historical is personal, but when the historical doesn't override the growth and importance of the protagonist. Salome is about John the Baptist, but it's also about self-destructive lust; Persepolis is about the Iranian Revolution, but it's really about leaving / returning.
I'm sure there are a billion people out there who disagree with me, especially about the anti-Tolkien bits. If you're reading this, and read books at all, I want to know what your lists look like. They're probably much different than mine, especially if you're Nader, in which case your second list would read "Medical literature" and "Facebook".
JeNoWriMo
For Christmas, I got this book called "No Plot? No Problem!". It's written by Chris Baty, the guy who started National Novel-Writing Month in 1999. He used to work at some kind of massive pre-recession dotcom business, and now he's a full-time writer -- apparently the sort of man who's successful at everything he does. It's hard to stop resenting him and start reading, but read I did, and I sort of like his breezy, plebian approach to writing.
Baty claims that what's holding most people back from writing their novel is not lack of ideas, but the lack of pressure associated with the activity. When you have days -- as I do currently -- filled with uncertain goals and far too much free time, you tend to spend them reading old Savage Love columns (so many old Savage Love columns) and doing the dishes, not writing bestsellers. Baty's idea is that, instead of dicking around and getting to it eventually, prospective writers should take one month and turn it into a sort of Writing Boot Camp -- a free-for-all writestravaganza in which any words added to one's Word document are good words, uncriticized words. It seems silly, but the guy has sold three novels since he started doing this, so I guess it's worth it to listen to him.
His words are especially important because I'm coming up on a giant mountain of free time, a mountain that a deadline would probably do some good for. My final job update is this: I'm about to accept the English-teaching Kinderbetreuung job I've been offered, since they called yesterday and offered me the potential of more money if they can get approval from what the secretary called "the big boss". Plus, the babies are adorable.
However, the position doesn't open until April 18th -- APRIL 18TH; I'm currently poor, and cannot shop to fill my time; and Nader has exams until mid-March. Basically, my only foreseeable tasks for the next month are keeping myself and the dishes clean while filling out the mountain of German paperwork necessary for a work permit.
So in order to keep me away from the Savage Love archives, I should probably write something, right? I'm going to do it -- try for 50,000 words of SOMETHING. I don't know if that something will ever see daylight, but maybe that's as it should be (see: all the fanfiction I wrote from ninth to eleventh grades). This is by March 21st, when my boyfriend finishes his exams and we can have fun again instead of learning about robots and typing for hours.
Los geht's! Goal forward!
PS, Chris Baty says that the support of friends and relatives is quite important during this period, if by "support" you mean "teasing about the novel that I am or am not writing". So go on, tease me, mock me if I do not complete something! Or else I'll go nuts from German inactivity and read every sex-advice column on the planet!
Baty claims that what's holding most people back from writing their novel is not lack of ideas, but the lack of pressure associated with the activity. When you have days -- as I do currently -- filled with uncertain goals and far too much free time, you tend to spend them reading old Savage Love columns (so many old Savage Love columns) and doing the dishes, not writing bestsellers. Baty's idea is that, instead of dicking around and getting to it eventually, prospective writers should take one month and turn it into a sort of Writing Boot Camp -- a free-for-all writestravaganza in which any words added to one's Word document are good words, uncriticized words. It seems silly, but the guy has sold three novels since he started doing this, so I guess it's worth it to listen to him.
His words are especially important because I'm coming up on a giant mountain of free time, a mountain that a deadline would probably do some good for. My final job update is this: I'm about to accept the English-teaching Kinderbetreuung job I've been offered, since they called yesterday and offered me the potential of more money if they can get approval from what the secretary called "the big boss". Plus, the babies are adorable.
However, the position doesn't open until April 18th -- APRIL 18TH; I'm currently poor, and cannot shop to fill my time; and Nader has exams until mid-March. Basically, my only foreseeable tasks for the next month are keeping myself and the dishes clean while filling out the mountain of German paperwork necessary for a work permit.
So in order to keep me away from the Savage Love archives, I should probably write something, right? I'm going to do it -- try for 50,000 words of SOMETHING. I don't know if that something will ever see daylight, but maybe that's as it should be (see: all the fanfiction I wrote from ninth to eleventh grades). This is by March 21st, when my boyfriend finishes his exams and we can have fun again instead of learning about robots and typing for hours.
Los geht's! Goal forward!
PS, Chris Baty says that the support of friends and relatives is quite important during this period, if by "support" you mean "teasing about the novel that I am or am not writing". So go on, tease me, mock me if I do not complete something! Or else I'll go nuts from German inactivity and read every sex-advice column on the planet!
Thursday, February 17, 2011
Laim: Less than Lame!
JOB SITUATION UPDATE:
So... Starnberg is too far away. I sent the family an email being like, "I really liked you guys! But I can't travel 1.5 hours every day...(andalsoyourchildrenareincrediblyoverpriviliged)". That's one job down, and since I only had one left, it would seem that the decision is made.
Instead, it's just been made more complicated. Problem is, I am an interview addict.
Seriously -- why do I do this to myself? Twice this week I've woken up much earlier than necessary, put on like six coats of mascara, accidentally kicked stuff in our tiny apartment over and made my sleeping boyfriend go "nnngghhh" pathetically, scrawled down the U-Bahn directions to some place far away from everything I know, and run to the train station while rabidly eating some sort of carbohydrate.
Then I've walked into the establishment with trepidation. I've noted the decoration and attempted to observe key details like "Do the teachers look happy? Do they look well fed?", then I've shaken some hands, then I've listened, nodding, for a while.
And then... the decision.
One of the two interviews I went on this week was the second interview at the Kinderbetreuung (place to shove kids for the day). It was the "let's see if you do well in practice" interview; I spent half a day there, monitoring eating, changing diapers, playing board games.
Happily, it turned out that the children are not the dead little zombies I thought they were. Rather, they are adorable cuddly babies who want to tell me things -- loud, running, screaming cuddly babies, but still. One in particular, this little mocha-colored man named Otto, has a habit of non-sequiturs that's incredibly endearing. Sample conversation:
Teacher: Otto, what's your name?
Otto: Zwei! (Two!)
Teacher: No, Otto, your name. Who are you?
Otto: Ich putze meine Zahne! (I brush my teeth!)
It was all cute, and the four hours went by very quickly. And at the end of it all there was a conversation (finally sitting in big-people chairs) with the two women in the office, a talk in which they said, "We think you'll do fine here, and we're formally offering it to you", at which I was sort of "hurray" and sort of frozen. I asked if I could have until the end of the week to decide.
I don't know what stopped me from saying yes that day. I think it was the same things I'd had a problem with before -- that the job pays 800 euro a month (which is much, much less than any nanny makes), that it's far away, that it's early, that I don't feel very qualified for it.
But it was also something else combined with those other things -- it was the fact that, although I was to be hired as the English teacher, I spent so much of the day inadequately explaining things to children in German, feeling overwhelmed, swept up in it. Although it was "English Day!", the class sang one English song and then the rest of the day was "Zieh dich mal aus, bitte" and "Was hast du gesagt?" -- the place was far from bilingual, and so were the kids. Most of them spoke little to no English, and I couldn't see myself, a single person trying desperately to keep up with the wave of diaper-changing and feeding, changing that.
And then.
And then I got, that same day, an email back from the principal of Munich's only English-speaking Montessori school, asking me to come in for an interview the next morning at ten. Nervously, feeling as if I were cheating on the job I already had, I said yes.
If you're not familiar with the concept (I wasn't), a Montessori school believes that children learn most between 2.5 and 6; that formal instruction, in these periods, is silly; that the best way to teach children is through a series of self-selected games. Which sounds like hippie bullshit, but isn't.
I observed a classroom this morning, hovering creepily in the corner -- the Montessori philosophy demands that children receive no positive reinforcement from grownups when they complete a game (as I was informed after I'd excitedly wanted to help a tiny curly-haired girl complete a horsey puzzle -- informed, and given a handbook and a pencil to keep me busy). Rather, adults are there to answer questions and keep order; qualified teachers are there to teach one-on-one lesson games, games with numbers made of sandpaper and beads and mats.
The kids here may have been older than they were in the Kinderbetreuung, but the room was still amazingly quiet, the contrast evident -- the floors had no carpets, but no noise was echoing. Instead, the children were playing calmly; two boys built a massive tower out of wood blocks; a kid painted; one little boy was sitting in the corner, listening intently to a pair of headphones. It was like a science fiction book, like here was a group of children raised in a laboratory, reared from birth to use their supernatural intelligence for ill.
Now normally, as anyone who has seen my closet can attest, I am not a fan of order, but after the screaming poopy German chaos of the previous day, I was intrigued. These children were not only learning English -- they were learning math, and handwriting, and fine motor skills -- and all of that without hitting each other. No hitting at all!
Also, it didn't hurt that the teachers here looked cleaner, more Zenlike, better-dressed. Most of them had been there for multiple years; the girl who tipped me off to the job opening, Kerry, had worked there since 2004 and seemed none the worse for wear. "I'm doing this while I pursue my opera-singing career!" she said cheerfully in her Australian accent. I instantly wanted to be her friend.
When I heard (trying to act nonchalant) that the starting salary was more than comfortable and that the pauses in the school calendar were more than ample, I was hooked. Being cocky from my most recent job offer, I thought I had it made.
And then the principal, an ex-military man from Illinois who was like a loquacious cross between J.K. Simmons and my father, had to go be all aloof. "Well, you probably won't hear from me for a week or so," he said. "You're the first person we've interviewed, and next week I'll be talking to other candidates! Then we'll go into a second round."
I was shocked. How dare he? MY JOB!
I walked out feeling like I'd just auditioned for a musical -- sort of excited, sort of shaky, unable to wait until the cast list got posted. As I unlatched the cute little gate and walked out into the cold, I realized that now, I even-more didn't know what to do.
So, friends: is there some business way to string the first job offer along while I wait for word from the military man? Or should I say yes to it -- am I just being enchanted by the novelty of the second thing? Or should I give up on children entirely and just be a barista for the rest of my life? Or... or... or...
Damn options.
So... Starnberg is too far away. I sent the family an email being like, "I really liked you guys! But I can't travel 1.5 hours every day...(andalsoyourchildrenareincrediblyoverpriviliged)". That's one job down, and since I only had one left, it would seem that the decision is made.
Instead, it's just been made more complicated. Problem is, I am an interview addict.
Seriously -- why do I do this to myself? Twice this week I've woken up much earlier than necessary, put on like six coats of mascara, accidentally kicked stuff in our tiny apartment over and made my sleeping boyfriend go "nnngghhh" pathetically, scrawled down the U-Bahn directions to some place far away from everything I know, and run to the train station while rabidly eating some sort of carbohydrate.
Then I've walked into the establishment with trepidation. I've noted the decoration and attempted to observe key details like "Do the teachers look happy? Do they look well fed?", then I've shaken some hands, then I've listened, nodding, for a while.
And then... the decision.
One of the two interviews I went on this week was the second interview at the Kinderbetreuung (place to shove kids for the day). It was the "let's see if you do well in practice" interview; I spent half a day there, monitoring eating, changing diapers, playing board games.
Happily, it turned out that the children are not the dead little zombies I thought they were. Rather, they are adorable cuddly babies who want to tell me things -- loud, running, screaming cuddly babies, but still. One in particular, this little mocha-colored man named Otto, has a habit of non-sequiturs that's incredibly endearing. Sample conversation:
Teacher: Otto, what's your name?
Otto: Zwei! (Two!)
Teacher: No, Otto, your name. Who are you?
Otto: Ich putze meine Zahne! (I brush my teeth!)
It was all cute, and the four hours went by very quickly. And at the end of it all there was a conversation (finally sitting in big-people chairs) with the two women in the office, a talk in which they said, "We think you'll do fine here, and we're formally offering it to you", at which I was sort of "hurray" and sort of frozen. I asked if I could have until the end of the week to decide.
I don't know what stopped me from saying yes that day. I think it was the same things I'd had a problem with before -- that the job pays 800 euro a month (which is much, much less than any nanny makes), that it's far away, that it's early, that I don't feel very qualified for it.
But it was also something else combined with those other things -- it was the fact that, although I was to be hired as the English teacher, I spent so much of the day inadequately explaining things to children in German, feeling overwhelmed, swept up in it. Although it was "English Day!", the class sang one English song and then the rest of the day was "Zieh dich mal aus, bitte" and "Was hast du gesagt?" -- the place was far from bilingual, and so were the kids. Most of them spoke little to no English, and I couldn't see myself, a single person trying desperately to keep up with the wave of diaper-changing and feeding, changing that.
And then.
And then I got, that same day, an email back from the principal of Munich's only English-speaking Montessori school, asking me to come in for an interview the next morning at ten. Nervously, feeling as if I were cheating on the job I already had, I said yes.
If you're not familiar with the concept (I wasn't), a Montessori school believes that children learn most between 2.5 and 6; that formal instruction, in these periods, is silly; that the best way to teach children is through a series of self-selected games. Which sounds like hippie bullshit, but isn't.
I observed a classroom this morning, hovering creepily in the corner -- the Montessori philosophy demands that children receive no positive reinforcement from grownups when they complete a game (as I was informed after I'd excitedly wanted to help a tiny curly-haired girl complete a horsey puzzle -- informed, and given a handbook and a pencil to keep me busy). Rather, adults are there to answer questions and keep order; qualified teachers are there to teach one-on-one lesson games, games with numbers made of sandpaper and beads and mats.
The kids here may have been older than they were in the Kinderbetreuung, but the room was still amazingly quiet, the contrast evident -- the floors had no carpets, but no noise was echoing. Instead, the children were playing calmly; two boys built a massive tower out of wood blocks; a kid painted; one little boy was sitting in the corner, listening intently to a pair of headphones. It was like a science fiction book, like here was a group of children raised in a laboratory, reared from birth to use their supernatural intelligence for ill.
Now normally, as anyone who has seen my closet can attest, I am not a fan of order, but after the screaming poopy German chaos of the previous day, I was intrigued. These children were not only learning English -- they were learning math, and handwriting, and fine motor skills -- and all of that without hitting each other. No hitting at all!
Also, it didn't hurt that the teachers here looked cleaner, more Zenlike, better-dressed. Most of them had been there for multiple years; the girl who tipped me off to the job opening, Kerry, had worked there since 2004 and seemed none the worse for wear. "I'm doing this while I pursue my opera-singing career!" she said cheerfully in her Australian accent. I instantly wanted to be her friend.
When I heard (trying to act nonchalant) that the starting salary was more than comfortable and that the pauses in the school calendar were more than ample, I was hooked. Being cocky from my most recent job offer, I thought I had it made.
And then the principal, an ex-military man from Illinois who was like a loquacious cross between J.K. Simmons and my father, had to go be all aloof. "Well, you probably won't hear from me for a week or so," he said. "You're the first person we've interviewed, and next week I'll be talking to other candidates! Then we'll go into a second round."
I was shocked. How dare he? MY JOB!
I walked out feeling like I'd just auditioned for a musical -- sort of excited, sort of shaky, unable to wait until the cast list got posted. As I unlatched the cute little gate and walked out into the cold, I realized that now, I even-more didn't know what to do.
So, friends: is there some business way to string the first job offer along while I wait for word from the military man? Or should I say yes to it -- am I just being enchanted by the novelty of the second thing? Or should I give up on children entirely and just be a barista for the rest of my life? Or... or... or...
Damn options.
Thursday, February 10, 2011
Jobs
My job search here in Munich has been a haphazard process. I showed up six weeks ago with a degree, little to no money and roughly zero knowledge of how one writes a resume. I spent days lolling around in my at-the-time tiny bed and bemoaning fate while perusing the Internet.
Slowly, a month and a half later, I have made progress. I have still been in bed on the Internet all day, but the bed is much larger -- thanks to Nader's ebay abilities -- and now, sitting in my inbox, are two messages from people who want to have me as their employee. Hurray!... sort of!
The first is from a woman I met yesterday. She was of a type one meets here; she had crinkly skin and white hair, she was wearing metallic blue eyeliner and a wool coat woven in many colors, like Joseph's. She slightly resembled Meryl Streep, which instantly frightened me in a sort of visceral, Devil-Wears-Prada way.
We sat down in a room covered in flower appliques and toys and green paint. You see, the job she was offering is at a child jail.
Not really, but sort of.
It's a "Kinderbetreuung", which translates to "place to shove your kids for the day". The school's website explains that many mothers nowadays would really prefer to work, and so why not place your children at our wonderfully-colored nest of rooms, where they will learn about snow and leaves and telephones and music and all sorts of different languages?
Intrigued by the web site, I applied as one of the people who would be teaching them all these different languages. I thought the job would be more that of an English teacher -- as in, I'd have formal lesson time and song time and stuff -- but it turns out, my job would more be to yell at the children in English all day. "It's surprising what they pick up!" she said in her elegant Germanic accent, eyes crinkling.
With me, it might be mostly swear words, I thought.
After she spoke with me, and decided my lack of a teaching license wouldn't really be a problem, we toured the facilities. They're cute -- there's a mini baby rock-climbing wall, a room full of beanbag chairs, and a bunch of rice on the floor. I met all eighty-five children ranging in age from zero to six; they were almost creepily intrigued by me, would move happily towards the doors as soon as Angelika opened them. I liked the five-year-olds best, and hoped, as Angelika steered me towards what would be my classroom, that the children inside were equally pleasant.
"I wasn't sure at first, since we need someone with a teaching degree, but I think actually that we need someone like you," she said. "All happy and cheerful! And so smart! And you must be smart, to deal with children," she said, and smiled, and I got all puffed up with pride. And then she opened the door.
The room seemed darker, more bare than other rooms. It smelled of cooked food and something stale. The babies inside drooled up at me, twelve of them, rice falling from their mouths. The teachers sat next to them on tiny stools, their eyes dead.
One girl with thick, dark-brown hair cut into a bob rose from her stool. "Hello," she said dully.
"Oh, this is the Maria!" Angelika said fondly. "She is the English teacher here, and she will be leaving us, unfortunately. You would be her protege!"
"Yes," Maria said. I couldn't place her accent. "I will be going to Sweden!" and her eyes glowed, imagining Sweden.
There wasn't much else to say, so I shook the other teachers' hands and moved on.
In the office, I made an appointment to come back next week for a second interview -- an interview at which they would give me a letter of employment, the first step to a work visa. I was excited, because I've been waiting for that letter for so long -- I can only legally stay in the country for six more weeks without it -- but I walked away entirely uncertain, thinking of the falling rice, the babies. For this, I won the sonnet contest?
The second job offer is from a family twenty miles outside of Munich. They live in a beautiful oak-floored slopy-roofed building just a few blocks from this massive gorgeous lake. I would be their after-school nanny, their snack-maker, their homework-doer.
Their children, whom I met last week, are precious -- they are native French speakers but, having spent years in the US, sound like they're from Iowa. They enjoy all sorts of hobbies and have wonderful toys; their bedrooms are Child Paradise, with lofted beds and wood ceilings and a massive dollhouse and a guitar set and beanbag chairs and wow.
I imagine they're a little lonely -- they moved to Munich six months ago and their German is not quite up there yet, since they go to the International School and speak English all day. Still, they have many friends. Did I mention how charming they are? And the girl in particular enjoys me; she is nine, and likes books, and made me listen to her read three picture books out loud, and asked repeatedly when I could come back. I, not knowing much about the nanny visa situation, said "I don't know."
My original plan, in moving here, was to have exactly this sort of mind-numbing job -- a job at which my brain could wander and do other things, a job full of scooping rice and changing diapers and watching two well-mannered children play peacefully upstairs. And then, on the train and at nights, I would work on a book, some sort of book, just to say that I'd have written a book.
But maybe it wouldn't be mind-numbing at all. Maybe I'm being silly and it would be exhausting.
Maybe my resume would have a huge vacant year in it, a year in which I did nothing but change diapers and assist with addition homework. And maybe this would be a problem for any sort of lucrative brain-absorbing job in the future.
And I don't know if I'd be saying yes just to say yes -- saying yes just because it's the easy option, because both of these people want me so much.
And could my ego take it? On the train ride back, phrases kept thundering repeatedly in my head, phrases like "This is why you took Grammar and Language?" But maybe that'd be a good thing...
I don't know, maybe they're both too far away -- what if there's something better closer? The kindergarten is in Pasing, which is 45 minutes away; the nanny job is in Starnberg, which is an hour and a half. I don't know if I can ride that much train each day.
I don't know if I'm supposed to be initially very excited about a job or not.
I don't know.
Does anyone else?
Slowly, a month and a half later, I have made progress. I have still been in bed on the Internet all day, but the bed is much larger -- thanks to Nader's ebay abilities -- and now, sitting in my inbox, are two messages from people who want to have me as their employee. Hurray!... sort of!
The first is from a woman I met yesterday. She was of a type one meets here; she had crinkly skin and white hair, she was wearing metallic blue eyeliner and a wool coat woven in many colors, like Joseph's. She slightly resembled Meryl Streep, which instantly frightened me in a sort of visceral, Devil-Wears-Prada way.
We sat down in a room covered in flower appliques and toys and green paint. You see, the job she was offering is at a child jail.
Not really, but sort of.
It's a "Kinderbetreuung", which translates to "place to shove your kids for the day". The school's website explains that many mothers nowadays would really prefer to work, and so why not place your children at our wonderfully-colored nest of rooms, where they will learn about snow and leaves and telephones and music and all sorts of different languages?
Intrigued by the web site, I applied as one of the people who would be teaching them all these different languages. I thought the job would be more that of an English teacher -- as in, I'd have formal lesson time and song time and stuff -- but it turns out, my job would more be to yell at the children in English all day. "It's surprising what they pick up!" she said in her elegant Germanic accent, eyes crinkling.
With me, it might be mostly swear words, I thought.
After she spoke with me, and decided my lack of a teaching license wouldn't really be a problem, we toured the facilities. They're cute -- there's a mini baby rock-climbing wall, a room full of beanbag chairs, and a bunch of rice on the floor. I met all eighty-five children ranging in age from zero to six; they were almost creepily intrigued by me, would move happily towards the doors as soon as Angelika opened them. I liked the five-year-olds best, and hoped, as Angelika steered me towards what would be my classroom, that the children inside were equally pleasant.
"I wasn't sure at first, since we need someone with a teaching degree, but I think actually that we need someone like you," she said. "All happy and cheerful! And so smart! And you must be smart, to deal with children," she said, and smiled, and I got all puffed up with pride. And then she opened the door.
The room seemed darker, more bare than other rooms. It smelled of cooked food and something stale. The babies inside drooled up at me, twelve of them, rice falling from their mouths. The teachers sat next to them on tiny stools, their eyes dead.
One girl with thick, dark-brown hair cut into a bob rose from her stool. "Hello," she said dully.
"Oh, this is the Maria!" Angelika said fondly. "She is the English teacher here, and she will be leaving us, unfortunately. You would be her protege!"
"Yes," Maria said. I couldn't place her accent. "I will be going to Sweden!" and her eyes glowed, imagining Sweden.
There wasn't much else to say, so I shook the other teachers' hands and moved on.
In the office, I made an appointment to come back next week for a second interview -- an interview at which they would give me a letter of employment, the first step to a work visa. I was excited, because I've been waiting for that letter for so long -- I can only legally stay in the country for six more weeks without it -- but I walked away entirely uncertain, thinking of the falling rice, the babies. For this, I won the sonnet contest?
The second job offer is from a family twenty miles outside of Munich. They live in a beautiful oak-floored slopy-roofed building just a few blocks from this massive gorgeous lake. I would be their after-school nanny, their snack-maker, their homework-doer.
Their children, whom I met last week, are precious -- they are native French speakers but, having spent years in the US, sound like they're from Iowa. They enjoy all sorts of hobbies and have wonderful toys; their bedrooms are Child Paradise, with lofted beds and wood ceilings and a massive dollhouse and a guitar set and beanbag chairs and wow.
I imagine they're a little lonely -- they moved to Munich six months ago and their German is not quite up there yet, since they go to the International School and speak English all day. Still, they have many friends. Did I mention how charming they are? And the girl in particular enjoys me; she is nine, and likes books, and made me listen to her read three picture books out loud, and asked repeatedly when I could come back. I, not knowing much about the nanny visa situation, said "I don't know."
My original plan, in moving here, was to have exactly this sort of mind-numbing job -- a job at which my brain could wander and do other things, a job full of scooping rice and changing diapers and watching two well-mannered children play peacefully upstairs. And then, on the train and at nights, I would work on a book, some sort of book, just to say that I'd have written a book.
But maybe it wouldn't be mind-numbing at all. Maybe I'm being silly and it would be exhausting.
Maybe my resume would have a huge vacant year in it, a year in which I did nothing but change diapers and assist with addition homework. And maybe this would be a problem for any sort of lucrative brain-absorbing job in the future.
And I don't know if I'd be saying yes just to say yes -- saying yes just because it's the easy option, because both of these people want me so much.
And could my ego take it? On the train ride back, phrases kept thundering repeatedly in my head, phrases like "This is why you took Grammar and Language?" But maybe that'd be a good thing...
I don't know, maybe they're both too far away -- what if there's something better closer? The kindergarten is in Pasing, which is 45 minutes away; the nanny job is in Starnberg, which is an hour and a half. I don't know if I can ride that much train each day.
I don't know if I'm supposed to be initially very excited about a job or not.
I don't know.
Does anyone else?
Thursday, February 3, 2011
Ulysses
I don't know why it took me so long to get back to JYM, really. I've been in Munich for a month now -- more than a month -- and until today, I hadn't visited the offices of the program that had brought me here.
"I've been busy," I told myself as I walked down that familiar street -- Gabelsbergerstrasse -- walked past all the engineering students, past the expensive corner pizza place and the music high school and all that old Nazi architecture. "I've been applying for jobs. I had things to do."
Really, I think it was just that I was afraid I'd walk in the door and they wouldn't care -- that any affection for me they'd professed had been thoroughly faked, that now that they had my thousands of euro and had processed my transcript, they would pretend never to have heard of me.
But there it was, the sign, the stone walls -- I walked to the door (the weather was still cold and gray) and I pressed the doorbell, and it buzzed, and I turned the knob but somehow it wouldn't open, it just spun in a circle, so I just kept turning it in a panic that this is how they would find me, back and without a job and not even able to open a door for God's sake, and then all of a sudden it was turning the other way on its own and the door was opening and there was Patrizia, office assistant, vengeful angel, former theater professor, her hair curlier than ever.
"Du hast es wieder zugesperrt!" she said. (You locked it again! Haha!). "Wie geht's??! Komm rein, komm rein!"
For whatever reason - I blame the children I've been babysitting in German for the past month -- speaking the language is no longer scary for me. I feel like my grammar hasn't gotten any better, but I'm no longer afraid of independently producing words -- I produced words for a solid half hour today, sitting with Patrizia in her office and stirring the cappuccino she'd made me. We talked about jobs, her job, my potential job, another ex-JYM student living in Munich who might be able to help me out, Brijhette (<3),>
H.P., my favorite semi-lazy German professor, had apparently invited his friend (his genius lies in the fact that he has many, many friends) to speak. Normally I would have bowed out, but I was intrigued: the man sitting in the library was a translator.
Literary translators, here in Munich, are a rare breed -- one must be well-established, a writer on one's own already; one must be experienced and know how to shop around manuscripts; one must be an experienced researcher; one must know that literary translating doesn't pay the bills.
Apparently, one must also know that literary translating can, on occasion, nearly kill you. That's what I learned today, mostly.
The man sitting in the library was a man about my height, a man with an annoyed brow and a silver beard and spectacles and two coats. Patrizia approached him. "Hallo, _____, darf ich jemand vorstellen? Das ist die Jessica, eine ehemalige JYM-Studentin; sie ist wiedergekommen, um Arbeit zu suchen..." (She's come back to look for work!)
The man took my hand, shook it somberly. Then he said, auf Deutsch, "And of course, also because of a boyfriend, yes?"
I laughed like hell. "Yes."
That was all he needed to know about me. I asked him what he was going to be talking about, and he said, "Do you know Danielewski?"
I didn't recognize the name, and was ashamed. "Noo?" I said sheepishly, a literature major.
He began to expound, talking mainly to Patrizia, glancing occasionally at me -- "The young in America enjoy his books; there have been many blogs written about them, their mirrored-ness, their inscrutability, and so of course now we must translate them into German, for the young folk here to read. But there are many problems with the text, even more than there were with the first novel -- for instance, how do you translate that title? Is it "Haus aus Blaettern" or "Haus dass Verlaesst"?---"
"WAIT," I said. "You mean, 'House of Leaves?'"
He looked at me.
I was going to say something about how much I'd hated that book, but instead I just nodded. "Yeah, I do know it!"
"House of Leaves" is this black-covered brick of a book. Later, in Hans-Peter's class, a girl was asked to summarize it, and she said, "It's about a house that is a labyrinth, and it's a book that is also a labyrinth". I'd never thought of it like that, but it's true -- the text jumps around the page, the footnotes are a story in themselves, pages will be jam-packed with print or nearly empty. I found it annoying, frankly -- it was cute at first, but I am a lazy reader, one who does not want to constantly be shifting a brick-weight book around in a circle in order to find out what happens. The main characters also seemed annoyed by the sort of visual art they were trapped in, and retaliated by being two-dimensional, which made me even more not want to finish it.
"I can see how that'd be hard to translate," I said.
"Just wait until you see the other one," he said, fuming, and he went to his bag and pulled out a well-marked copy of the author's less-successful second novel "Only Revolutions". I opened it to find pages that look like this:
"Oh god," I said. "It's like Ulysses, except..."
"Yes, quite," he said.
Apparently, it's about two young people who carry on a romance that lasts for 200 years and a road trip that travels across America. That's it. "Nothing else really happens," he says. "It's just very... Facebook. It is what the young in America want right now. It is a truly American book."
Translation of this book required the man to surf through thousands of web pages for each book-page he translated -- in the margin, aided by Wikipedia, the author had chosen to write events that happened on the day the book was taking place. Generally, with the aid of the Internet and native speakers, he could figure it out, but once he'd encountered a word that "ONLY OCCURRED IN THE TEXT. It was NOWHERE else on the Internet." Except for a discussion board posting about the novel, that is.
On the board -- which was full of people gushing about how awesome the book was -- he posted the baffling page with the baffling word, with the sentence, "If anyone can tell me what this means, I will give them ten free copies of this book."
Nobody could.
The man talked for thirty minutes. Patrizia and I stood and nodded; Patrizia, on occasion, added helpful things; I mostly made what I thought were intelligent-sounding noises and sent vague "get me a job like yours even if it's hell" rays in his direction. It was like being in a lecture, but a lecture where not only were you judging the professor, he was also judging you, sitting up there behind his podium with a furrowed brow and -- when you chose to speak -- a careful appraisal of your German abilities.
I fear I came up short -- once or twice Patrizia had to translate for me into better German -- but at least now I've met someone semi-famous, or at least someone who has in his possession, printed out, an angry email from one of his colleagues to Danielewski that says, in summary, "Take your book and shove it. I can't make any sense of this bullshit. How is this published??"
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