Trying to move in the middle of a pandemic has been an interesting task. With only six months of high school left, I have been given the task of finding out what I want to do with my life. For me, that was clear: get out of America. Make no mistake my fellow reader, this has not been easy.
No one in my household knows what it is like to immigrate to another country, there were not many I could talk to. I’m doing this alone. I want to move to Denmark, im not allergic to socialism so that’s not an issue. Denmark is a country that I could fit in with visually being a tall blond-haired, blue-eyed man. It’s perfect, right?
Turns out finding the correct visa is really difficult. Out of the 21 visas, visas like a work visa or refugee visa, I’m only applicable for one. This visa is called an Au pair visa, Au pair is a French word that means “equal footing.” Essentially what I would be doing is staying for a host family and taking care of their kid, not bad right?
After I found my visa the next step was getting a passport. This is something I’ve never had to do, normally if someone my age has visited another country it was as a kid and their parent got the passport but this isn’t the case for me. This is another thing on the list of things I would have to do myself. And it was expensive. Two hundred bucks later and an appointment to the post office and I have my passport. This leads me to the step I am currently at now. I have my passport, I know my visa, now I just need to find a family… This has been the hardest part of my journey, I have spent hundreds of hours now scouring the internet for agencies that take male au pairs (That was an oversight). See there are no rules saying that men can be an au pair, only a hundred years of tradition of women being au pairs. This will not stop me, I have found a site that takes applications for male au pairs, and now it’s a matter of time until I find a family.
This is something you can do too. Don’t content with your surroundings just because the alternatives seem difficult. Get out there and find something you want and pursue it.