Yelyzaveta Filisiuk, AU PAIR, Scandinavia

I have been living in Denmark for a little over a year.

My family is mixed: the mother is Australian, and the father is Danish. Everyone speaks excellent English. An American friend told me that I now have an Australian-American accent, and neither my speech nor my everyday manner suggests I am from Ukraine or Russia.

There are three children: Katya,14, Jake,12, and Maya,11. They are good children, although things were difficult with the younger ones at first. They have different degrees of Asperger's syndrome. It sounds frightening, but it is manageable. The author describes it as a form of autism. The boy has bouts of aggression and is very attached to his mother, but there is nothing especially frightening. I try to be understanding, and after a year I can say that the children, especially Maya, love me very much, which is lovely.

There were many duties. The house has three floors, and I was responsible for cleaning, laundry, ironing and the children. My working day was from seven to six, with a couple of free hours in the middle. I attended courses when I first arrived.

I went for six months and then stopped. They took a lot of time, and I saw little point because I spoke English and everyone here knew it.

The town is small, with only 10,000 people, but the sea is five minutes away. It is cold but very clean. Of course, there was culture shock at first. Everything surprised me, from people's smiles to the spotless beaches and lack of crime. In my town, you could practically walk down the street naked! It is wonderful. But at first it was terribly boring: after 15:00 the streets were deserted.

There are no very large cities. After Copenhagen comes Aarhus, with 300,000 people, like our Poltava. It is a country of farmland and cyclists. All the children cycle to school, and everyone cycles to work too. Beautiful, really.