When I started looking for a host family, I wasn’t set on Belgium — or really any particular country. I knew I would be living with these people for a whole year, so finding a family I genuinely connected with mattered much more to me than choosing a destination first.
That was how I ended up moving more than 8,000 kilometres from the US to Bruges.
I decided during my senior year of college that instead of going straight into a corporate job, I wanted to spend a year as an au pair.
A lot of people started their search with a country they really wanted to live in and then looked for a family there. I did it the other way around.
When I started looking at families, the location wasn’t my priority. I kept my search open because I cared more about who I would be living with than where they happened to live.
It was only after I had spoken with my host family over a few video calls and felt a genuine connection with them that I really started researching Bruges.
They told me more about where they lived, so I looked up the city myself. I saw how beautiful it was and realised how easy it would be to explore other parts of Belgium and Europe by train.
The fact that Bruges turned out to be such a good fit felt more like a bonus.
Because I knew I could potentially be living with a family for a whole year, I took getting to know them seriously.
Whenever a family interviewed me, I saw it as a chance to interview them too. I wanted to know whether our personalities worked together and whether I could actually imagine feeling comfortable in their home.
With my host family in Bruges, that connection felt natural.
They had already hosted au pairs before, and I was their third. That helped too. The boys understood what having an au pair meant, so instead of taking a long time to warm up to me, they welcomed me very quickly.
My host family also included me in their life from the beginning. When they had plans or went somewhere, they often invited me along.
That was something I had hoped for when choosing a family: I wanted the freedom to have my own life, but I also wanted to feel like I was genuinely part of theirs.
My host family ran a restaurant, and we lived above it, so their everyday life became a pretty big part of my experience in Bruges.
Some days I would have lunch from the restaurant before starting my afternoon with the boys. I usually worked around three and a half hours a day, picking them up from school or daycare, playing together, having dinner and getting them ready for bed.
There were lots of small moments that made living with a family abroad feel very real.
My host dad taught me how to drive a manual car. I discovered that a chocolate sandwich could be a perfectly normal meal for a child in Belgium. And when I went to London for the weekend, my host mom dropped me off at the train station for the Eurostar.
Those moments were probably a better picture of my au pair experience than anything I could have imagined before leaving home.
Once I arrived, I loved getting to know the place I had ended up choosing almost by accident.
Bruges sometimes felt like something straight out of a fairy tale, and I explored a lot of the city by bike and on foot.
I also started Dutch classes. Learning the language wasn’t always easy, but it gave me another way to understand more about Flemish life and the culture around me.
And being based in Belgium made travelling relatively easy too.
I could take day trips or use my weekends off to explore somewhere further away. I even took a weekend trip to London.
Before becoming an au pair, I had imagined that I might spend practically every weekend travelling somewhere new. That wasn’t really how it worked out.
A bigger weekend trip around once a month or even every other month was much more realistic for me. Day trips were easier, and sometimes I simply had a free day without a big plan.
I actually had more alone time and flexibility than I had expected.
That meant getting comfortable doing things by myself, making my own plans and sometimes accepting that not every day abroad had to be packed with something exciting.
Looking back, I was glad I hadn’t limited my search to one particular destination.
Of course, where you live matters. I loved Bruges, learning Dutch and having the chance to travel.
But most of my actual life as an au pair wasn’t spent sightseeing. It was spent at home, around the dinner table, picking up the children, playing with them and sharing everyday life with my host family.
That was why finding people I genuinely felt comfortable with had mattered so much to me.
If I had started with a list of countries and focused only on where I wanted to travel, I might never have found the family that brought me to Bruges.
Sometimes the right host family might lead you somewhere you hadn’t even considered.
We'll be happy to help you on your way.
