Adventures of an English Teacher

For Turkish Daily News http://www.turkishdailynews.com.tr/article.php?enewsid=89204

In 1999, bored with life as a journalist in rural New Zealand, I came to Europe looking for adventure. I started in Spain, because my English uncle had a house in the southern city of Malaga. I did not speak Spanish, however, and could not find work.
After three months my savings were low. I decided to join my brother, a photographer in London, taking the bus all the way from Malaga.
The day after arriving in England I had a job at a holiday village on the Isle of Wight, off the southern coast near Portsmouth. I later worked in bars on the Isle of Man in the Irish Sea, Jersey in the Channel Islands off France, and near the city of Rugby in central England.
During this time, nine months, I traveled to Scotland and Wales, and also to Denmark and Norway to meet, for the first time, my father's family.
It was in the Guardian newspaper that I saw an advertisement for people to train to become English teachers. I was accepted for the course, which was inMadrid, and returned to Spain a year after arriving there for the first time.
I spent the next nine months working in Jaen, a small olive-growing city between Cordoba and Granada. There were few tourists, so it was a perfect place to learn Spanish. But it was a little boring, and there was no teaching work in the summer. So I looked on the Internet and got a summer teaching job in St Petersburg.
I traveled to Russia by train and bus, all the way from southern Spain. It took three days. This was in 2001 and Russia seemed less modern and organized than Spain. But the students were hard working and quick to learn.
On Sept. 11, 2001, one of the students told us about the terrorist attacks in America. She had seen it on the television news and we spent the class talking about it.
I flew back to Spain from Finland and worked for nine months in Vitoria, the capital of the Basque Country in the north. Vitoria is a nice little city, but theweather was not good. Why come to Spain for English weather? I thought.
In 2002 I moved to Barcelona and stayed there for the next three years. Barcelona is a beautiful city with great beaches and fantastic architecture. I thought I would never leave. But I continued to work on nine-month contracts and needed work in the summers. In 2003 I went to Shanghai, China for two months.
Shanghai is a big city, which makes Istanbul's traffic problems seem small. Think of Maslak or Taksim with the addition of thousands of rickshaws and bicycles! But the people were very friendly and everything was so cheap.
I saved enough money for a holiday in Rome afterward, and was lucky enough to see Pope John Paul II in the Vatican City. He was very old and not well, but he came outside on a hot day and spoke to us in several different languages.
After another nine months in Barcelona I went to London and spent six weeks teaching mostly Italian teenagers at the University of Greenwich. We showed them around the city in the afternoons and played football with them in the evenings.
I had a lot of savings the next summer and decided I wanted to visit Turkey, a liberal Muslim country with a lot of history and culture. I thought that it would be another interesting experience, like Russia and China, and then I would return to Barcelona.
However, I soon fell in love with Istanbul. In fact, during the past two-and-a-half years I have spent more time in Turkey than in Spain!
I am also learning the language – slowly. It is more difficult for me than Spanish, which has a similar vocabulary to English.
From Turkey I have traveled to Athens and three Greek Islands, and also to Bulgaria, Romania, Egypt and Syria. In January I plan to visit India.
I never thought, when I left New Zealand in 1999, that I would have so many opportunities and be able to see so much. But it all became possible after I got my English teaching certificate in Madrid seven-and-a-half years ago.