Tagged with expat

The New Year resolution revolution.

Today a woman stopped me in the street on my way out of the metro, as I was trying to cross the road to get to my apartment, and food. “Do you know how to be happy?” she asked, smiling unnaturally and handing me a flier. I’ve been homesick all week thanks to working Christmas, I haven’t had a day off other than Sundays in several months, and I’m going through an ‘I hate my job, I’d rather be anywhere else but here’ phase. It will pass, but strangely enough when my blood sugar is on a downward spiral and there’s a strange woman keeping me from my food… that’s not something I remember.

I think I may have muttered ‘no,’ rather offishly, and looked pointedly at the lights willing them to change.

She handed me a leaflet: ‘Keys to a Happy Life.’ As I walked up the stairs I realised she was a Jehovah’s Witness. They’ve made it to Asia now? Where do I have to move to escape them?

Which, of course, has me thinking about happiness. My personal happiness project has slipped a little this month, thanks to aforementioned burn out and lack of festive spirits. I’ve been mainly focusing on getting out bed in the morning, and on not crying at work when a kid makes my life difficult on Christmas day, and I look on Facebook to see friends and family having Christmas as it should be. Whatever, it’s been hard, but it’s not like I ever thought it would be easy.

Onwards and upwards, and here comes 2015. There are many arguments for why New Year’s resolutions don’t work. The easiest comparison to make about them is that they’re like diets. They’re a short-term fix rather than a lifestyle change, and people quickly slip and pile back on the pounds, or the broken resolutions. Here’s a link that will send you to a study on New Year’s Resolutions, with the statistics that 60% of them fail, mainly after the first week. A plethora of articles across the internet advise making small changes that are attainable. This seems logical enough. But I’m going to go back to the Happiness Project here for inspiration, or what I termed my ‘Buddhism Project‘.

Sure, setting a small goal may be easier to keep, but it’s also easier to discard. I like the idea of stepped changes. Like Gretchen Rubin adds a new set of changes every month, I like to have an end goal that is fairly considerable, but broken down into manageable steps. Losing a total of 40 pounds can be broken down into 3-5pounds a month, for instance, which is achievable and also allows room for failure on one or two of the months.

Another article, published only about 15 hours earlier than this blog post, says that New Year’s resolutions are procrastinating something you should be starting today. Sure, if it’s losing weight or quitting smoking maybe. I personally like the idea of a concrete date to make a change, though, and here’s where the revolution aspect of resolutions comes in: using the last few days of the old year to properly take time to reflect on your life is valuable time to think over what realistically needs changing, and how to do it. I like the word revolution for its double meaning: typically we think of revolutions as an uprising against a political power, but the word originally come from the Latin ‘revolutio,’ meaning turn around. A new year is a fresh start, a revolution, or a turn around. A reason to look at what hasn’t been working, and what has been working but could work better. I like to think of it as a chance to refocus: to look at where I’ve gone off track this year, and to work on pulling things back in.

For me, this year has been somewhat stale. This may seem odd as I’ve graduated and moved to Asia in 2014, but in terms of having a direction in life I’ve actually backtracked. This was mainly due to a messy break up and my somewhat rash decision to flee the country when, excuse the phrase, I was so confused about what was happening in my life that I couldn’t tell my arse from my elbow. Suddenly I was in Taiwan going ‘how did I get here? What?’ Strangely enough, this is a common story here. In many ways this year has been a huge turning point in my life, but most of it has been spent trying to figure things out, remembering how to be alone, getting good at being alone again, losing the ability, regaining it, and dealing with a full time job involving lots of very very small humans who don’t speak my language.

In conclusion, I’m currently working on my list of New Year’s resolutions. Nowhere does losing weight feature, or quitting smoking. I don’t smoke so that’s a no-brainer, but you get the principle. My main challenge is to be more productive with my time, so that I can manage to fit a life of my own in around my job. I’m starting with getting up earlier. Not much earlier, just an hour or so. Then I’ll try and be productive in that hour. Then I’m going to get up a little earlier still until I can fit in a decent amount of exercise, or a blog post, or some Chinese. I’ve been working on phasing out TV series’ (on my laptop, I haven’t watched an actual TV in a long time) for a while. It’s going pretty well, but then it’s an ongoing process, not sudden cold Turkey.

While there’s no reason not to do this throughout the year, I personally like the concrete milestone provided by the New Year, and the inevitable reflection on the past year that we all find ourselves doing. I don’t believe New Year’s resolutions are worthless, or procrastination. They’re a way of starting as you mean to go on, of staging a revolution against what isn’t working, and of turning around and refocusing the things that are but could do better.

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Can I stay on your couch, stranger? Being homeless travelling.

My flat in Taipei doesn’t have heating. It’s COLD. I could buy a heater, but I’m not really at home enough to justify the expense. Three weeks ago it was still beautiful weather, and so a friend and decided to go to the beach before it turned wintery again. For the first time in my life, I stayed in a hotel. I’ve always worked to earn money to travel before, but I’ve never earned enough to afford luxuries.

Three and a half years ago I came back from being in South America for three months exhilarated by travel and looking for any way possible to continue my wanderings. So I started using couchsurfing (www.couchsurfing.org) much to the disgust of my flatmates, who definitely weren’t fans of strange men and women off the streets who smelled a bit funky (generally the first thing they do, and certainly the first thing I always do is ask to take a shower) wandering into our kitchen and being given cups of tea. The three particularly wonderful things about couchsurfing are that it drastically cuts your travel budget, it can make traveling alone a much less lonely experience, and it can show you a far more real side of the city than the one you see otherwise. A hostel in Europe costs around $15-25 a night, depending on the city, and that’s for the cheapest dorm room where you’ll be sardined in with a lot of other travellers. You’ll probably be eating out, because cooking a hostel is awkward, even if they do have a kitchen. This adds another $10-20 a day, if you’re eating cheaply but with okay nutritional content (I’m not counting the travellers I know live on bread and that’s it).

If you couchsurf, though, you’re looking at a free bed. And often the use of a kitchen, so you can make proper food and have a proper food budget. It’s nice to cook for your host or take them for a meal, but that doesn’t blow the budget if you’re staying for a couple of nights. This takes the daily bed and board budget from around $40 to $10 a day. Suddenly, travelling between terms as a student when you have no money becomes possible again.

Except for when you don’t have a bed, and spending money on a hostel seems to not only be an extreme waste of money by this stage, but also has a sense of failure to it. There’s something anticlimactic about saying ‘I couchsurfed right down to the southernmost point of Crimea, except for the night when I couldn’t be bothered to send requests so just stayed in a hostel’ (I couchsurfed all the way, that’s another story).

This has left me in the awkward situation of being bedless and roof-over-headless, with nothing working out at the last minute like it usually does. Three times to count, in Krakow… Krakow again, and Salzburg. The first time I pulled the solo female traveller card that I very rarely do and don’t really respect myself for doing – I hung around in a club until I found someone who would let me sleep on his couch. I emphasised that I just wanted to sleep on his couch. He seemed very confused about what was going on, but acquiesced. This may seem shady, but one of my cardinal rules of travelling alone is don’t drink much if I don’t have someone I trust around, and don’t do any sort of substances. I don’t ever want to lose control of myself and not know what happened.

The next night I still didn’t have somewhere to sleep, and I decided to spend my day on a  free walking tour. This is a fantastic way to see a city, and I completely recommend it if you’re ever in Krakow or any other city that does them. Worrying idly about not having a bed, I began to pay more attention to our guide. He seemed pretty eccentric. Very eccentric. ‘Do you couch surf?’ I asked. ‘Of course!’ he replied, ‘I love crazy people!’ It seemed legitimate. ‘Do you have a spare couch tonight? I couldn’t find a host.’ ‘Of course! Meet me outside the Mosque at 8, we’re going drinking first.’ And so it was that after the walking tour I joined him and a few others from the walking tour for a pub crawl. I learned a bit more about my host while we were downing rainbow shots of vodka that were more sugar than alcohol, including the information that he was a Lord of the Rings fanatic. So much so that he moved to New Zealand and hung around the streets trying to score a part in the Hobbit movie. You can read an article about it here: http://www.odt.co.nz/news/queenstown-lakes/194741/all-days-work-goblin

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My host in Krakow, Poland. He looked a little different at that time.

That night I and two lovely girls from Andorra stayed in his bedsit apartment with him, one of the girls and I in the bed, the other on the sofa bed with him. There was a lot of giggling from the bed, but I’d had a little too much cherry vodka and fell fast asleep while the party carried on around me.

The next day I went to stay with an actual host from couchsurfing who had finally accepted.

A year later I was in Munich, and heading to Salzburg, hitchhiking with my then boyfriend. There’s a noticeable difference in how easy it is to find a host when you’re two people. I know myself I like to host solo travellers much more than couples or friends travelling together, mainly because I feel I get to know them much better. I also feel more bound to help out solo travellers in a fix, and I’m sure that one of the reasons I get hosted so easily when travelling alone is that people feel the same way. One person without a bed inspires far more sympathy than two.

As we were waiting at a gas station by the border of Austria and Germany, I got a message from a woman called Bambi. Bambi said she would be able to host us, and we should let her know when we got to Salzburg. ‘See!’ I triumphantly told my boyfriend, ‘I told you things always work out!’ He muttered something and sloped off to smoke down a nearby bank again. It was cold, and had been raining for hours, and we were soaked because we’d been standing there for hours. This gas station was failing us miserably, and we’d been offered rides to everywhere except Salzburg. In retrospect, we should have taken one of them.

Finally a young man in an ancient and battered VW pulled up and told us to get in. It had been an hour and I hadn’t had a reply from Bambi, but I wasn’t worrying too much yet. He told us he was about to study Sports Sciences, and he was staying overnight with a family friend. We vaguely attempted to score a couch, but it clearly wasn’t going to happen. He dropped us off at a motorway station on the edge of the city so that I could get wifi and see if there was any word from Bambi. It was now very late, about 11pm. I was starting to worry a little. Sure enough, no word. ‘Let’s walk into the city centre at least,’ I suggested. ‘It might give her a little more time to reply.’ My boyfriend didn’t seem optimistic, but agreed. The rain had at least gone off a little.

We found shelter in one of the only places still open: the bar of a boutique hotel. I ordered a cup of tea to warm up with, and he ordered a beer and went outside to stress smoke frequently. A group of middle aged and plummy accented English business men came in and sat down at the table next to us, shooting odd looks across from time to time. We were two very, very scruffy bedraggled hitchhikers, with limp cardboard signs to previous destinations strapped to our bags, sitting in very civilised surroundings. I’m not sure I’ve ever felt as rough and out of place as I did then.

It was now 12.30am, and still no word from Bambi. The barman was beginning to shoot us annoyed looks, so we left and went back to roaming the streets. We found a hostel and tried to convince them to let us have one bed between the two of us, but they wouldn’t and at 18 euro a night, we weren’t willing to get one each. We found some Koreans outside the hostel, but they really weren’t much help and we didn’t thing we could smuggle ourselves in amongst them. They also didn’t seem to speak any English, as became evident after us talking about them well within earshot for a considerable amount of time raised no reaction.

The Koreans went inside, and we got bored and wandered off. We found a very shady Gentleman’s club, and a cat that danced when I stroked its back. We got rained on again. Unlike Taiwan, where there are also elderlies on bicycles, Berlin, where there are always pervy Turkish men, and Glasgow, where there are a lot of drunks, Salzburg is completely deserted at night. And I mean completely. We saw absolutely nobody in our two hours of wandering. It’s that civilised that people go to bed at 10pm and stay in bed.

We went back to the 24hour McDonalds, but it wasn’t 24hour, it was 12am-7am. I used their wifi for just long enough to establish that we could hitch out first thing and a South American would be able to host us in Vienna. We just needed somewhere for that night. Briefly, we considered pitching our tent in a park, as we had done by a gas station in Munich. But this was in a considerably more built up area, and I suspected that drifters probably wouldn’t go down too well.

At last, we found a house that was having heavy amounts of construction work done. Clearly no one was living there: the yard was rubble, but it did have an empty shed. Desperate, freezing, and at 2.30am in the morning, we crept in to escape the harsh wind, curled up, and went to sleep. Unfortunately I get vivid dreams when I’m stressed that lead to me sleepwalking and sleeptalking, so I had a nightmare that a man with a torch had found us. I woke up shouting ‘there are people beneath us!’ Another time I shivered so violently that I shook myself awake.

At 6am when it started to get light we crept out and back to the McDonalds, where we loitered outside waiting for it to open. At 6.30 a strange assortment of hipster Austrian business men wandered along too, and paced up and down outside in their pinstripe suits that stopped a few inches above their ankles, and their floppy half-shorn haircuts, glaring at their watches. When McDonalds opened we and the hipsters dashed inside for the heat and the coffee. We regrouped. I have never had a worse night of sleep in my life. We went outside. I put out my thumb by the side of the road, and I held up a sign saying ‘Vienna’, and we got the hell out of Salzburg.

Salzburg. The picture here couldn’t be further from my experience of the city.

And hopefully, those will be the last stories of homelessness I will ever have to tell. This stay in a hotel has marked a new chapter in my life of travel. While I’m sure I’ll rough it many more times, I now at least can pay for a hotel when I’m in a bind, and not have to resort to breaking and entering.

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Don’t eat meat? “Peace, man.” Being vegan in Taiwan.

This morning I was tutoring one of my lovely private students, a 40 something year old woman called May who has an irrepressible sense of fun, and appalling English grammar that she refuses to work on. For some reason, we spent the entire hour discussing religion, including me making a rather hesitant and unsuccessful attempt to explain the difference between Catholicism and Protestantism, and the differences in the hierarchies in both churches. I’m not very religious; I stopped going to church when I was 7 so that I could go and drink hot chocolate in the coffee shop across the street with my dad. I guess you could say I converted to worshipping at the alter of coffee shops at an early age.

Inevitably, Taiwan being a partially Buddhist country, the subject of Buddhism came up. “Do you know they have their own TV channel, their own restaurants, and their own hospital?” she asked me. I nodded. “And,” she learned forwards and dropped her voice to a whisper, as though preparing to impart a terrible secret, “Buddhists in Taiwan… don’t eat meat!” She leaned back in her chair so she could see the full impact of this revelation on me. “Well neither do I,” I said, smiling. She slapped her thighs loudly and laughed as if I’d just said the most hilarious thing. “They believe killing is bad!” She said. I nodded, “so do I.” “And some of them,” she lowered her voice again to rev up, “won’t even eat milk and eggs because they believe it hurts the animal!” I nodded. “But fish?” I shook my head. “Onions and garlic?” This is a common question in Taiwan when I say I don’t eat meat. Buddhists believe that Alliums, the family of plants to which onions and garlic belong, stimulate the blood too much which raises the emotions: so they don’t eat them. “I eat onions and garlic, just nothing from animals.” May leaned back fully and squinted at me, thinking hard. “You know,” she said at last, “my Aunt doesn’t eat anything from animal, so I know lots of places. There’s a good one on the second floor of Sonjiang Nanjing MRT station.” And just like that, we returned to the surreal lesson topic. This is typical of the reactions I’ve had here. Confusion about fish and meat, then question about onions and garlic, then concern about how I’m managing, then recommendations for places to eat. My favourite reaction was from one of the women who works at my school, who just said “Oh,” nodded grimly, then said “peace!” and gave me the peace symbol.

According to Wikipedia, 13% of Taiwan identifies as being vegetarian. This is the largest population of vegetarians anywhere in the world, and it was one of the reasons I chose Taiwan to move to. A lot of the vegetarians here are inconspicuous and over 50. The Buddhist buffets, of which there are many, are packed full every lunch and dinner and even those who eat meat will choose to eat in vegetarian places from time to time. At the large Buddhist buffets that are all you can eat and cost an arm and a leg, you can find everything you can imagine. Because it’s for religion, not health, in general the Taiwanese have chosen to recreate meats and fish with soy. I avoid soy and replacement meats as much as possible, but it’s been quite surreal to see what looks like chicken and fish, complete with scaly skin, on the buffet platters.

typical fare at an upmarket veggie buffet

Typical fare at an upmarket veggie buffet

Although it’s easy enough to be a vegan here, being a healthy vegan has presented far more of a challenge. In past year, and even in the 6 months since I’ve moved here, veganism as a health craze is visibly starting to take off. Restaurants such as Herban, Miss Green, Mianto and Ooh Cha Cha are championing healthy, fresh and often raw vegan food that is worlds away from the greasy fake fish and tired vegetables on the buffets. The catch, naturally, is that this Western style vegan food comes with a Western price tag. I now cook mainly for myself, because eating out all the time was making a choice between running down my health with the amount of oil and soy, or running out of money.

Vegan brunch at Herban kitchen, by Zhongxiao Dunhua.

Vegan brunch at Herban kitchen, by Zhongxiao Dunhua.

Since I changed to being vegan over two years ago, I’ve lived in Berlin and Glasgow, and hitchhiked all round Central Europe. Apart from an uncomfortable experience at a Bier Garten in Munich surrounded by an entire abattoir worth of roast pig, the experience has been fairly plain sailing. Vegan life in Taiwan is getting easier and easier, and I’m excited to see what the next year presents. If nothing else, it’s just a nicer quality of reaction I get from people than the usual ones in Europe.

Peace.

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Tales from the classroom #1: reflections on teaching

Teaching day in, day out, can get pretty tiring. So something I’ve started doing at the end of each day is taking time to remember my favourite moments. I’m nowhere near diligent enough about doing this, as sometimes the last thing I want to do in the evenings is remember that I teach children and I’ll have to see them again soon. Nonetheless, it is a good practice to keep, and in the spirit of keeping it, here are a few of my favourite anecdotes.

Taiwanese children and shoes

There have been a series of shoe incidences in my older and younger classes. Walter (2) who can’t speak a work except for ‘uh oh!’ when disaster looms (or when he’s just tipped out someone’s water bottle everywhere) will break ranks to toddle up to me when I’m teaching, expressing his emotion with a mixture of crying/moaning/wailing/shouting. Naturally, I assume something is horrendously wrong and I stop the class to deal with this crisis. The crisis is that the heel of his shoe has slipped off. Mia (also 2) spent the first 2 months of my class not listening at all, but solemnly taking off first one shoe, then a sock, then the other shoe, then the sock, then putting one sock back on, then one shoe, then the other sock, then the other shoe, then taking the shoe off again, then the sock, then the other shoe… You get the idea. It was a process that required a lot of concentration and sometimes help from the other children. Timothy (also 2… Sensing a theme yet?) is one of the newest students in my class and spent the first two weeks being exceptionally distressed about his mum not being there. His response to this distress was, instead of clutching a comforter or soft toy, clutching his shoes as he barrelled (he is by no means small, I call him the kettlebell kid) around the classroom wailing, and occasionally breaking out and dropping his shoes into the bathroom sink.

Meanwhile, in Bushiban, I introduced my children to the game 20 questions. Instead of trying to narrow down their options, they prefer just to attempt mind reading by shouting out answers. The 20 questions pass by very fast. One of my favourite moments was when Dean (approx.8) shouted out the first question of a new round. Except it wasn’t a question, what he shouted at the girl with the answer was: “IT’S A SHOE!” As I pointed out to him, of all the millions and millions of objects and plants and animals in the world, why, just why, did he have such conviction that the answer was a shoe?
Peein’acdotes

When working with small children, bodily functions are unavoidable. Be it rediscovering the hilarity of a fart with a room of 5 year olds, or the constant exposure to pee and poop when working with toddlers (thankfully diaper changes are handled by my classroom assistants) there is no avoiding the messier side of the human body. When I started, the majority of my children were still in diapers. Now the majority (not the vast majority, but a lot more than at the beginning) have been toilet trained and will get up in class, clutch themselves in the relevant places and shout “PEEPEE!” Whereupon they will get rushed out, stripped from the waist down, and thrust against a urinal/onto a tiny toilet. Sometimes they put the pants back on afterwards, sometimes not. I havent established why redressing their nether parts is optional. This process of potty training has not been without hitch. The attempt to potty train Nolan has, at last check, been aborted. I don’t think it lasted longer than a week, because the poor kid kept appearing by me or my c.a and making a helpless noise, gesturing to the pee that drenched his pants and trickled onto the floor. At one point he was going through three pairs of pants… Not three pairs a day, but three pairs in my class, which is 90 minutes long. Eventually, after this had happened for the third time and Nolan was in his final pair of pants, his upbeat spirit gave out. The pants were too large for him, and kept falling down, leaving his tiny buttocks exposed to the elements. He broke down, and helplessly wept, climbing onto my knee and clinging to me for dear life. There is nothing more heartbreaking than a kid who keeps wetting himself.

Sometimes, wetting of pants can provide more hilarious results. Joon, one of my three Korean toddlers, trotted up to me during our Monday play session where I turn them loose to run off their Monday morning steam. He gestured to his pants, which were soaked, and I handed him over to Rachel for a change. So far so good but, I realised, the puddle was nowhere to be seen. Where was the scene of the crime? The mystery was soon solved when I heard “Laoshi, laoshi!!” (Teacher, teacher) being shouted from the play house. When I looked through the door, four of my toddlers were trapped inside by a pee puddle that neatly spread from one side of the doorway to the other, completely trapping them inside.

The final pee tale is one of gender defiance. Sofia (2 again) is my shyest, sweetest girl who spent an entire month being terrified of me and fleeing behind the nearest Taiwanese person whenever I approached, sometimes literally thrashing across the floor for more speed. Fear has now turned into a sort of awed reverence, and she follows me around, shows me her nail polish, and the other day stood watching me write communication books and kissing every one. Sweet. Anyway, I was standing in the bathroom one day when I saw her pull her diaper and panties down. I assumed she was preparing for a pit stop on the toilet, and for some reason didn’t think to question it when she walked towards the urinal instead. It was only when she hiked up her dress and executed an expert hip-thrust forwards that I clued onto what was going on. Clearly, she had watched many a boy use the urinal and she wanted to see what all the fuss was about. Not having the right equipment be damned! she thought. It would have been an admirable gender barrier protest, but she hadn’t hitched her skirt up far enough, and instead of hitting the urinal she just, like so many of these stories, soaked herself. I could have stopped things, I know I could, but I was standing laughing. It wasn’t my finest moment as a caregiver.

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Teaching in Taiwan: the things they don’t tell you that I wish I’d known.

When I researched moving to Taiwan, I read a lot of really great things that got me excited. I’m not about to burst that bubble; on the whole, life here is pretty good. But here are the things I wish I’d known before I moved here.

The days can be really, really long. 

Depending on your job, mainly if you came through a recruiter (I highly recommend Reach to Teach) and have ended up at one of the big chains, your days will be long. In the interview, it was a little unclear to me what my hours would be. I thought I was coming for an all day kindergarten job. Looking back, I’m not really sure why I thought this. All day kindy jobs have the nicest hours of any that my school offer, so I think it was the one that was pushed more in the job description. When I got to Taiwan, I was pointed in the direction of the toddlers and told they were to be mine. I genuinely thought it was a joke. I had no experience with under-fives. None. Zilch. Nada.

I now work Monday to Friday, 10-6.40 with 20 odd minutes added on at either end for getting in/out. BUT and here’s the kicker, I’m paid by the hour and only actually teach for 5 1/2 hours of the 9 hours I spend on school premises. Add a half hour commute on at either end and it takes my day to almost double what I’m paid for. Granted some of that time is my lunch break, but I have lesson prep to do, or I just stay on school and study Chinese. For all intents and purposes, I’m at work. I do kindy in the morning, and Bushiban in the afternoons. Some other colleagues start at 9 and finish at the same time as me.

Moral of the story: ask what time you can expect to get into school, when you’ll be heading home, and how much of that you’ll be working and paid for.

You probably won’t get your first full paycheck for about 3 months.

I arrived in Taiwan at the end of June, my first full paycheck was… October. My friend who is at a different school arrived in August and her first full pay check is this month, December. This is for two different reasons: I arrived in summer, when the work they had for me was a curious assortment of subbing and summer camps. My actual proper classes didn’t start until September and the new term. For the last 2 weeks of August I was working about 12.5 hours a week. It costs money to set up a new life somewhere. I was eating out, I paid 2 months of rent upfront on my flat as a deposit, I was going out to places to try and meet people. All of this on very little pay. They told me I would need enough to see me through the first 6 weeks, and I blithely assumed that because my contract says ’16 hours minimum for the trial period and 20 hours guaranteed afterwards,’ that’s what I’d be getting. I didn’t expect to have my savings completely eaten away, and my overdraft.

My friend didn’t get a full paycheck because she had to pay for her own ARC (working visa). They took a sizeable chunk out of several paychecks until it was paid off. Luckily, my school paid for mine, or I may have had to move into a cardboard box on the street.

In February, bushiban (the cram school) will stop for 2 weeks. This means I’ll only be on 7.5 hours a week for 2 weeks. That 20 hours guaranteed that it says in the contract? Turns out holding to the contract isn’t a two way deal.

Moral of the Story: check how consistent your hours will be. Check when you really start. And be prepared for the financial commitment that is Taiwan.

They don’t mention holidays in the contract because there aren’t any.

Holidays? Sorry, you want what now? Clearly I made a basic Asia rookie mistake in assuming that I would get the occasional day off. I get national holidays, typhoon days, and that’s it. And national holidays are by no means frequent. They don’t celebrate Christmas here, so I’m working christmas day, and almost every other day between now and the end of my contract. My contract is for a year, and in that time I think the number of days I have off adds up to around 8. If I subtract the times I’m asked to work weekend days, it basically cancels out.

Moral of the story: I may have travelled a lot, but clearly I haven’t experience of getting jobs in foreign countries. Don’t be naive like I was. If you’re getting a job here, be prepared to also aquire the work ethic. Coming straight from being a student, it was a shock for me.

Your first year might be hard.

This seems like a no brainer. You’ve moved to the other side of the world to a totally different language and culture, to start a new life and a new job. Of course it’s going to be hard! There’s more to it than that though.

One thing in particular annoys me and my foreign teacher friends here: the reactions from people back home. I always feel a little petty bringing this up, because I know that if you haven’t taught abroad, you don’t really know what it’s like. Hell, I probably would have put my foot in it in the exact same way before I came out here. Common instigators of teeth grinding are: “so how is your programme going?” “Are you enjoying your travels?” “What an adventure!” I know these comments are well meaning, but the assumption that I’m on a volunteer-esque programme, travelling like crazy and lazing around in the sun before coming back to the UK for a proper job… Well, it just makes me a little irritated after I’ve worked for three months straight with only one day a week properly off. My free time is spent trying to squeeze in exercise, learn Chinese so that I can function here, and occasionally getting out of the city at the weekends. In essence, I have a job here. I have moved to a different city, and I have got a job. Just because it’s in a different country, one in a place that is semi-exotic and unknown, doesn’t mean my life is exotic and unknown. I work, I eat, I sleep, and I try my best to play in-between.

And the truth about meeting people with that work schedule is, it’s going to be hard. If you don’t work or live with people you get on well with, take up a sport or something similar. Otherwise it can get very isolating very fast.

And finally, a lot of people’s first jobs here suck. A lot of people’s first years are hard. It takes a while to settle, make things work, and find your routine. Once that happens, life becomes a lot easier and your workload lifts dramatically. I’m not there, but I know people who are and their lives are very easy indeed. Stick with it and ride the learning curve.

Moral of the story: of course teaching in Taiwan is an adventure. But it is also a job. It is one that will give you ups and downs, and you might go through patches of hating it. It’s natural. If you come with the reactions of those at home in your head: the assumption that it’s going to be a non-stop glamorous adventure, you’re going to be pretty bummed out when reality hits that you actually have to work here. When I balanced my expectations and the reality that this was really just another place to life, I became a lot happier.

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