From Horrible Heathrow to Essex

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As we flew over the Thames I felt rather depressed about having to go back to working again after having such an amazing time traveling. Little did I know how much Heathrow Airport would do its very best to make matters even more unpleasant. When we landed, there were not any gates available for the plane to park at, so we sat on the runway for the best part of an hour. In the end they allocated us a section of the tarmac to disembark; however, the airport staff could not find anyone to drive the stairs over to the plane, so we just sat there for another half an hour until they got their act together. The pilot became rather fed up with the scenario and told us all that he was staring at three idle sets of stairs and could do nothing to hurry up the process and simply described it as a "Heathrow moment."

Once we eventually disembarked and were transported to customs, we then stood in line awaiting processing for another hour or so, but were kept entertained by a rather eccentric Russian nuclear physicist who laughed heartily every time he completed a sentence! We had suspicions that he may have consumed a few alcoholic beverages throughout his flight.

Eventually we made it through customs, roughly 3 hours after we first touched down. By this time our bags had been circulating on the luggage carousel for some time and when we finally went to collect them we discovered that they had both been opened and some items had been stolen!

To top it all off, our teaching agency contact whom we had arranged to meet at the airport had left to catch a plane of her own, so we were now stranded and had no way of filling out the necessary paperwork before beginning work on Monday.

After this horrible entrance to the country, I felt like doing something to lift our spirits. We found this in the form of old friends from home who are living in Stoke-Newington, which is in north London. They let us stay for two nights, the first of which entailed a drunken night of catching up with old friends and making new ones.

We have spent the majority of our first week here trying to set up a life from scratch, including opening bank accounts, getting a mobile phone (for free - that's how competitive the market is over here!), buying clothes for work and settling in to a new work environment. This last point has probably been the most challenging, as the students in Essex certainly have more of an 'attitude' that those back home and the school seems to pander to them like they are scared of them. On one particular day a student was adamant that he was not going to be moved as a result of his disruptive behaviour, so after I amped it up a notch with the volume of my voice, he promptly stood up and made his way to the door, believing he had the right to leave the room when he wished (I later learned that they do actually allow this!). I ordered him back inside and probably lost my cool a little, following him into the corridor and blocking his exit. It was at this point that I realised how unusual it was for a teacher to raise their voice at this particular school, with three staff members emerging from their rooms to see what was going on. In the end, we coaxed the boy into another teacher's room and I returned to my room to get back to the business of teaching. I later discoverd that the boy shoved the other teacher once I was out of the corridor and slammed a door on them. He then bolted and rang his parents on his mobile phone (not supposed to have them at school) and guess who got in trouble? Me! The disruptive student who left class without permission, struck a teacher and used his mobile phone had no repurcussions for his actions and I was spoken to by two senior members of staff. I could tell that the student was quite surprised to have a teacher stand up to him and not back down and the students in my classes throughout the remainder of the day all worked in utter silence. So, in future I will have to careful in the way I conduct myself and over time I will hopefully earn the respect of my colleagues. It will be quite interesting to see what transpires during my second week of teaching at the school, but hopefully it's not as eventful for the wrong reasons.

Well, I better head back to our crumbling hovel that belongs to the school. We are living there with five other entertaining staff members who hail from Scotland, Cameroon, England and Australia. Their company makes living in such dire accommodation more bearable, but how long we last at the house is still an unkown, although it may be out of our control if the house puts itself out of its misery and collapses into a pile of rotted rubble...

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