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Our home, Vrahati
Fresh oranges every day! Our 2011 started in Bali - we had The Plan and as always with plans some of it didn’t work out and other bits were nothing like we’d expected. But all for the best.
Our flight back to the UK was from Mumbai at the start of February. So at the start of Jan we flew to KL to apply for our India visas. We had places on a 10 day silent Vipassana course in Kerala, which we were very excited about and after that had booked to stay at Green Palms homestay in the Kerala backwaters. Train tickets booked, accommodation – we were all set. And then after a week of waiting in KL our India visa was declined…
We had been warned this might happen – new changes in visa regulations meant that they were giving out less visas to non residents of Malaysia but since this was not official policy we didn’t know and we’d expected to be okay. We never really found out what happened but some people told us that the Indian authorities are taking moves to discourage Europeans and Russians from unofficially making India their home on a tourist visa by changing the
regulations – hence the needing to leave the country for two months before re-applying and needing to apply for a visa from your home country.
Anyway that left us with quite some time before our TEFL course in Greece started in mid-Feb (this was part of The Plan – we were to qualify in TEFL and then work in the Mediterranean over the summer – it was all possible the director at TEFL Corinth had assured us). We looked at so many options – and in the end the cheapest was to abandon our Mumbai flight and return home on the cheap with Air Asia.
We had a few great weeks in Devon, during this time we were interviewed for a course on sustainable horticulture at the Schumacher College in Dartington and were accepted for a September start, to our joy. We stayed down on the Lizard in Cornwall for a glorious few days and then onto Holland for a wonderful time with familyand friends and then it was to Greece for the TEFL intensive.
We were a little apprehensive about the course. We’d booked it in Bali when we didn’t have much internet access and hadn’t really
done a lot of research. It was cheaper than the CELTA and its main selling point was that it had a recruitment agency attached. We had an email exchange with the director who assured us we could find work in the med/Greece after the course for the summer. However when we’d been back in the UK we’d done a little more research and found that the course appeared on something called the TEFL Blacklist along with some unpleasant accusations, complaints about the course and the chances of finding work afterwards. Oh dear. However we’d paid our deposit and decided to just go for it.
We were based in Corinth in Greece for a month in a small village just outside, which actually was pretty and the sea and bay were lovely .It was out of season and unfortunately after a couple of glorious crisp blue-sky days the rain and wind set it (unusual for Greece) and didn’t move again for about a month. There were six others on the course and this was the best thing about the whole experience – the people we met!
On day one it became clear that the director was very ill and was
to be undergoing chemotherapy for part of the course. And as the recruitment agency was only his wife, who was understandably very stressed, very little happened on the recruitment front.
There was a stand-in teacher (a Greek woman) who lasted a couple of days and caused maximum stress by tearing apart lesson plans just minutes before you were to go in and teach. We found the mornings on pedagogy long and boring and unnecessarily detailed while the lesson planning and teaching (at a local school) in the afternoons was always rushed and disorganized and maximum stress (really unnecessarily). However thanks to wonderful Amy, the other American support teacher, we soon started to enjoy teaching and often split lessons together. We took some great weekend trips to Corinth and down to Monemvasia.
For a while it looked like we might find a live in au pair deal on Kos which sounded good but on the last day that fell through. So we decided to head to Athens and then onto one of the islands nearby and hang out together in a little apartment and make a new plan.
Thanks in part to a howling wind on Andros which meant we couldn’t
leave the apartment and do all the hiking we planned by the end of the week we were sorted.
We had pretty early in the TEFL course established that employment opportunities in Greece were pretty zero over the summer – the season starts in September. And although we’d been offered tutoring jobs in a hotel we stayed in it wasn’t enough money. The six month contracts in many of the other countries were a problem too. We calculated we’d make more money doing a UK summer camp for six intense weeks than working the summer in Turkey. So by the end of the week we had 4 job offers in the bag for the UK for July and August, had set up some really exciting organic farming projects in Greece and the UK and were good to go! We had about 3 weeks before our first organic project on Paros started so we went island hopping. From Andros to Mykonos (and Delos) then to Santorini (Thira). We loved being so close to the sea all the time, meeting other travelers and staying in little cheap out of season apartments. The weather wasn’t great but we lost some of the feeling
we’d had about Greece being so tragic. On the mainland you could really sense that people were struggling to survive and while people were friendly there was a real sense of a country with a tragic past and a difficult present on the islands they seem happier. It was still hard but you felt that there was a cycle of life and a community. Next up was Naxos but then something happened.
While we were job hunting in Andros Zoe’s Mum had told us about a job, she’d spotted in the Wwoofing (Willing workers on organic farms) at an organic farm on the English Welsh border. The owner was looking for two support workers to help run the market garden for the season. It looked amazing and we applied. We heard back from the owner’s wife who said the owner would be in touch but then we didn’t hear anything. We assumed we were unsuccessful and had set up the other jobs and then headed off travelling. However on Santorini Zoe decided to just contact the owner to see why we hadn’t been successful. It turned out he hadn’t seen the email. And within a couple of days we
were flying back to the UK for a trial week! It just felt really right and we were so excited and hopeful. And as it turns out it was just perfect. Wales it is then!
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