He’s been in Thailand for just over a year now. Like so many that had come before him and so many that are sure to arrive after, he followed his ****. Now thinking with it is not such a bad thing but at times you’ve got to stop and ask yourself, ‘is it really pointing me in the right direction?’ For him the answer turned out to be no.

Like so many before him the job opportunities were slim picking and could be counted on one hand; actor (I mean extra), model ( I mean slave to all that is wrong about this world that we live in today) or teacher ( I mean, ‘hey you speak the lingo, we’re not fussy, we NEED you!).

So he weighed up the ‘options’ and came to the conclusion that teaching was the thing for him. Next day he looked in the Bangkok Post, found a number, dialed the number, had an ‘interview’ and was told he started tomorrow. ‘Great’, he thought with more than a few questions on his mind. He asked the first one that he thought was most important and it was all summed up in one single self-explanatory utterance, ‘just teach!’

So that is what he did. He through himself into the task and semi-successfully completed a year at a Thai Government Secondary School. Yes there were ups and yes there were downs. He found that he was also learning at the same time. February was spelt with two R’s, as was interrupt.

All in all it turned out to be a good year but he wasn’t sure that he could reproduce the miracle of what he’d done last year. The well was running dry. So, he decided to complete a CELTA course; four weeks of intensive learning on how to teach adults, and of course the course turned out to be fine. It wasn’t as stressful as people had made it out to be but it was time consuming and he woke up every morning as tired as a narcoleptic That had just finished a smoking session with Bob Marley. On completion of the course he had a brain brimming with knowledge and just one thought on his mind, ‘do I really want to go back and teach kids that don’t want to learn?’ A part of him relished the  challenge of creating interesting lessons and making the kids love English lessons, but with Thai teachers that taught the kids to so ‘eww’ instead of the letter ‘L’ and the same Thai teachers telling him to go and talk to the kids about football for a ‘lesson’ he was facing an uphill struggle. Who the fuck am I kidding, he faced an expedition.

Yep, it’s safe to say that his heart wasn’t really into going back to teach at the Government School, but with no degree and enough wits about him to not get a fake one, he didn’t have too many options.

He felt like the tutors from the CELTA course had taught him how to cook mouth-watering, five star Michelin cuisines, and he was going back to boil eggs!

This is his expedition…