I met Gabi on a train back from Prague sometime in early 2000. She was returning to her job as an au pair for a German family in Regensburg, I to mine teaching English in Munich. In May 2011, over 11 years later, we met again, in Brno, where she now lives with her husband and their young son. Gabi spent several of the intervening years au pairing in London, where she met Frantisek, a Slovak, who strangely enough was doing the same. At some point they returned to the Czech Republic, she first, he following, Gabi finding a job as a translator, and Frantisek as a computer programmer for a new Microsoft outpost, brought to Brno with the support of European Union enlargement subsidies.