by Melanie Denyer

Created on: November 28, 2007

Living in France is probably one of the best things I did with my youth. As part of my modern languages degree I had to spend a year in Paris as an au pair, a job I stuck at for all of two weeks, after it became apparent that I was likely to be treated, quite literally, as a slave for the duration...

So, at the tender age of 20, with few qualifications and limited spoken French, I found myself out on the street and looking for a new home and a job to pay the rent. It felt somewhat like being the character at the beginning of a Zola novel, arriving penniless from the countryside to make my fortune, simultaneously terrifying and exhilarating.

Fortunately, this was the summer and there was space in a good youth hostel opposite the Luxembourg Gardens in the Latin Quarter. The building itself had seen better days, but had probably, at one point, been the residence of a minor nobleman or banker. There were staircases everywhere, and a slightly improbable layout but these and the courtyard only added to the charm. What detracted from the charm, though, was the first job I managed to find, serving up burgers at MacDonalds on the Boulevard St Michel. Money was tight, and I stank of chips by the end of each day, but I did at least get a meal for each shift I worked there, which was often the only meal I ate - no wonder I was so slim in those days!

Yet I did not give up hope of finding a better job. I spent the day looking in the traditional places for jobs, such as the American Church, or poring through the pages of FUSAC, or walking from bar to bar. I was also looking for an apartment, or at least a bed within someone else's apartment, as the pittance I was making at MacDonald's wouldn't have covered the rent of even the smallest of studios.

The search for an apartment came to an end when I took the last place of four in a two bedroom flat in a north-eastern suburb, sharing with a French architect, an English lad who was nominally studying in Paris but who spent far more of his time smoking pot than he did studying, and a guy from Marseille who always had some scheme going and spent what little spare cash he had buying ties from Tati and asking me to tie the knot on them as he never could get his head round it.

The search for a different job, however, took rather longer, but not for the lack of offers. Had I not been through it, I would scarcely have believed the range of jobs I turned down. Some involved bar work at even less pay than I was getting at MacD's. Another bar

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