The Last Few Months

Since I haven't written very many of you during the summer, I thought it a good idea to sum up the last few months. I came to Finland to work as an Au Pair during the summer to get to know the Finnish culture first-hand and to pick up the language. In the first week I was given the nickname Tomppa (equivilent of Tommy) by a drunk Finn named Pekka who said I needed a Finnish name if I were living in Finland. The first few weeks went pretty good, but once July hit they didn't. Basically, the problem was lack of communication. As my employers, the family failed to approach me when they were unsatisfied with how I was doing things. The harder I tried to do what they were expecting of me, the more they stepped in and had friends and relatives come and take care of the kids and cook their lunch. It finally came to a point (after we agreed to change my wages to hourly pay) when they went on vacation for eight days leaving me no work to do, and when they came back told me that the father had two more weeks vacation and wanted to spend time with the kids. So my hours were cut to 2 hours of house work a day without my agreeing to it. I approached the parents with this dilemma and them saying I could work on the grandparents farm the next week to earn more money, to which I responded that is not in my contract to do farm work to make up the wages nor did I agree on a decrease in hours. Well, the next day they came to me and said they have been unsatisfied with me the entire time and I have until the end of the weekend to pack my stuff, find a place to live, and move out. (It was thursday afternoon).
Luckily, everything worked out. A friend of mine let me stay at his place for the weekend and I found an apartment available only for the month of August. The family, seeing as they were extremely, extremely poor (I saw an ad which had their same coffee machine ON SALE!!! for about 150€/$200, yea. these people were living month to month) gave me for the entire month of July only what they, apparently, could afford which was a little more than what they paid for their coffee machine (and the coffee didn't even taste like anything special nor worth 150€) .
But everything worked out. I got some extra money from MOM, returned to the restaurant business and began working.
Just last week I moved into a new apartment about 4 buildings down from the one I stayed in for August which is located in a part of Helsinki called Kallio and more specifically Sörnäinen, and began my job working as an English Language Consultant/English teacher at an Adult Learner Center called MJK Instituuti.
I'm currently working 8 days a week between both jobs and waiting until my restaurant hours get back so I can actually have some free time (which should hopefully be next week!
That's about it for now.
Until then