Life changing experience, and great for Chinese culture & language knowledge!

When I arrived to China as an au pair, it wasn’t my first time in the country. I had been a student there for a semester already (although in a different city) and I felt like I hadn’t established…a real relationship with the country, if you know what I mean. As a foreign languages student, I also wanted to improve my language skills, which I wasn’t very satisfied with. Mandarin students out there, I’m writing this for you: towards the end of my program, Chinese people I met for the first time would ask me how many years I had been in China! Lopair’s program helped me develop not only much better language skills (my Chinese teacher was just AWESOME, one of the best teachers I ever had!), but also the skills to talk to Chinese people. I understood so much more about Chinese culture and society and, combining that with the language, I feel like I achieved a much more complete knowledge of China. My host family helped me a lot with that: every one of them, from my Chinese mom to the family nanny, was patient enough to answer my many, many questions (“What’s in that dish? What’s that guy doing exactly? Is that a traditional character? Can you SERIOUSLY buy all that stuff on Taobao?”) and they never missed a chance to point interesting things out for me. We also travelled together to parts of China that I would have never seen by myself, which was amazing.
Obviously, this doesn’t mean that everything’s going to come super easy. Chinese culture is very different from Western cultures, and it does require an open mind and a lot of flexibility and patience. What they say about Chinese children being spoiled is true most of the time, so expect to be baffled by parent’s and relatives’ behavior sometimes, and just bear in mind that you were raised in a different education system. Chinese people also tend to make decisions very quickly and to give you very little notice for either eating out that night or taking a two week trip to Korea the next day, which can be unsettling, but just until you get used to it. China has made me a much, much more flexible person and I also have to say, Lopair did a great job at preparing me and fellow au pairs for these and other situations at the arrival orientation camp. They have a good perspective of what Westerners find strange and they really give you priceless tips to handle your family life, your host kids’ tantrums and potential culture shocks at your best. For example, having minor control issues (before my program!), I found it very reassuring to get a detailed explanation of how culture shock works, so that when it happened, I knew it was just a phase and didn’t freak out.
My time in China really made me a better person, not even mentioning how nice it looks on my resume. I would most definitely recommend this experience, and if you’re undecided about which agency to choose (as I was, because of the aforementioned control issues), I’d definitely say go with Lopair. They take their job and your safety seriously, and if I had the option to go back, I’d do the same thing for sure!