4 Jobs I've had
-- Private English tutor to two teenage boys
-- English teacher for grades 2-4 of Elementary school and in a language school in Brazil
-- House cleaner in my first two years here in the U.S.
-- Teaching assistant (and "associate" -- with my own class) for 6 years
4 places I've lived
-- in France as a baby (until I was 18 months)
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-- Philadelphia area now
4 favorite foods
-- Potatoes (home fries, baked with herbs and seasonings, in any way...)
-- Artichokes and dishes with artichoke in them (particularly Trader Joe's artichoke tortellini)
-- Brazilian pastel (like a Hispanic empanada, but much crispier, not soggy at all)
-- Argentine (or should it be Argentinean) alfajores -- "sandwiched" honey biscuit with dulce-de-leche filling and dipped in chocolate.
4 places I'd rather be
-- in Brazil with my friends and family
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-- anywhere
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4 movies I can watch over and over
-- Cinema Paradiso
-- Jane Austen adaptations, particularly Persuasion and A&E/BBC Pride and Prejudice (not a movie, I know)
-- Back to the Future trilogy (my husband and his brothers are HUGE fans and I caught on)
-- The Sound of Music
4 TV shows I like to watch (I don't watch TV at all, but when I used to watch or in the brief periods we had cable I liked these):
-- Sex and the City (I only saw the whole last season after it had ended on Comcast On Demand)
-- TLC's A Baby Story (and sometimes A Wedding Story and others)
-- TLC's Trading Spaces
-- TLC's While You Were Out
4 websites I view daily
-- blogs in my blogroll
-- a Gateway desktop purchased in in 1998 (just like M) when we both started grad school (my mom has it now)
-- a Gateway laptop in 2003 (we sold it to our friend in Brazil)
-- another (cheap) Gateway desktop in 2004 -- we have this one, but nothing works (the CD/DVD drive, the card readers, it's a pain)
-- a Toshiba laptop
4 people to tag
I think most people in my blogroll have done this, but I tag my friend Keiko, who blogs in Portuguese.
Hey there, welcome back to blogging! I'm pretty sure I did this meme a long time ago, but I've seen it pop up again in different places lately. Anyway, I have been reading lots of blog posts on various reasons for hiring/not hiring housekeepers, and I'm interested in hearing about your perspective from the other side of the fence. How did it feel to clean houses, especially as someone with a university degree? Were you with an agency with other women in similar situations, or were your co-workers in very different situations from you? Or did you not have any co-workers? I know that in Brazil it is common to have household help. Did that bring up any issues for you, now that you were the help? I went to college in an area that was quite economically depressed and one summer I worked two jobs, cleaning hotel rooms and a supermarket job. For me it was just a passing thing, but for most of my co-workers that was as good as it was going to get, jobwise. It was an interesting experience, to say the least.
ReplyDeleteHere in Spain the whole attitude to jobs and working is quite different. A lot of middle class moms work as cashiers in supermarkets, for example, and the whole class dynamic seems, well, different.
Sorry for rambling here, and I know you have a lot of other things you wanted to blog about (and this all is none of my business, anyway), but I just thought I'd throw the idea out there in case you felt like elaborating.
Hi Kate, I wrote a comment on Jody's blog, you probably didn't see it since it was the very last one (22nd). I cleaned houses on my own like most, if not all, Brazilians in this country do (I don't know why, but Brazilians are very enterprising when it comes to cleaning here). I distributed flyers (over a thousand), but since we lived in a poorer area, didn't get much response. I didn't enjoy it at all, but mostly because I don't like cleaning much anyway. Being absolutely fluent in English and having an university degree made me feel kind of bad for being doing that, but I had no choice since I couldn't do anything else, if you know what I mean.
ReplyDeleteI did enjoy the very unique opportunity of learning about American culture by seeing the "inside" of various kinds of households. And I got to help this old man I cleaned for -- I volunteered to rack his leaves (16 of those huge paper bags) and I talked to him a lot. It wasn't that bad, but I still felt extremely depressed that year since we didn't know what the future would bring.
Yay! I'm so glad you're back!
ReplyDeleteOh, I hadn't seen your comment before. Yes, I'm sure it was interesting to get that inside look (and actually the privacy issue is one reason why I would think twice about hiring a housecleaner.) The home is such an intimate space. Here standards are very high on cleanliness (needless to say, I don't even attempt to keep up, but people spend several hours a day cleaning their homes or having someone else do it for them...
ReplyDelete