Maybe British host families aren’t the worst

This American family borrowed 1000 dollars off their Norweigan exchange student and then he got booted out of the country!

Still, I still think host families in London win the prize. One Brazilian student told a hilarious story of rushing to secretly cook a potato while their host mother was out only to hear the car pulling into the drive and having to rush a baking hot but half cooked potato into their bedroom. More worringly, when I showed part of the famously depressing British film (even by the usual standards of British films) Nil by Mouth, two of my students said “That is where we live!”

So, I always tell my students to study in New Zealand, Canada, Australia and the States (in that order) if they want to stay in a host family. Amazingly, some people in those countries let foreign students stay for free, rather than to supplement the dole and a bit of cash in hand window cleaning and the occassional selling weed down the pub. Cultural differences never fail to amaze me…

Tags: News

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 20th, 2009 at 12:22 am and is filed under Cultural differences/ cultural training, EF, links, TEFL, TEFL chains, TEFL in the UK. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.