Guest Writer Number 4- Sharon McCulloch from “somewhere out East”

Sharon has written a very nice piece of working and living “somewhere out East”, back when they really still meant something mysterious… Enjoy!

Living “somewhere out East” 

Budapest – the very name, like Belgrade and Warsaw, conjured up images of espionage and romance. I pictured myself in grainy black and white, to a soundtrack of Bartok (or, if I’m more honest, that Elton John number, Nikita). So, when I was offered my first TEFL job there, I bought a guidebook and plane ticket and started listening to Liszt. Then the personnel manager called me up and asked me to go to Prague instead. Thus began my ten-year odyssey into the world of open-faced pork fat sandwiches.

On the evening I arrived, the manager of the school took the team of six new teachers to dinner in a typical Czech restaurant. He explained the menu. Utopenci, or “drowning men”, turned out to be pickled pork sausages, which, horrifying as they might sound, were not as bad as tlacenka, which translated as “bloody head cheese”. I had the breaded pork cutlet.

Prague at that time was not a place for vegetarians or those with a cleanliness fetish. Deodorant was not available, nor, if the smell on the metro was anything to go by, was soap. Getting a visa took hours of pleading with a mustachioed granny and the students wore double-breasted purple suits. As a country with a communist history, factory hours were not uncommon, so I often found myself waiting for trams on icy streets at 6.30 am. Upon arriving at the student’s office, I would more often than not be offered a glass of slivovice (plum schnapps) before getting down to the serious business of the present perfect.

Alas, with modernization, came charcoal suits, Caesar salads and professional standards. These days Prague is as sophisticated and beautiful as Paris. It even has the dog shit. It’s in winter, when the streets are misty and deserted, that the city really works its magic. One can wander around the cobbled old town at night, the silence broken only by the clanging of trams and the drunken bellowing of stag parties from Newcastle. If that’s not your bag, you can always head for a basement bar for a nice frothy beer and some bloody head cheese.

Thanks a lot to Sharon for that. If anyone else has anything at all related to teaching or living abroad they’d like to write about, just leave a “yes please!” comment in the box below and I’ll email you very soon.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 25th, 2007 at 10:34 pmand is filed under TESOL, Teaching English Abroad. 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.