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Published: July 13th 2016
How can something seem so far away and before you know it, it’s knocking on the door saying c’mon you ready!
Five months ago I made a huge decision to follow my dreams on an 11 ½ hour flight all the way to China. I had wanted to travel Asia for as long as I could remember but plans always on hold for one reason or another. Well no more! I decided your nearly 30 Gemma just do it! So off I went to STA Travel and they presented me with this cool idea of teaching English while I travelled. Perfect let’s do it!
Now as a rather analytical person this was the point I had a million questions how do I get a visa? What injections do I need? How much is everything? Absolute madness!! Let’s make a list (the first of about 20 by the way)
So first things first let’s see what this online course is about. I spent 4 full days on the first module of the course shot through it like a bullet, interesting and not too difficult nervously completed the first test… yay passed! But with 3 months to complete this course no rush seems easy (first mistake right there).
About a month later after lots and lots of googling, it’s time to get on with this course and OMG the 2
nd module was much more information who knew there were 12 different tenses! So on we battled I haven’t looked at this stuff since high school!
All modules complete time for the big one flexing my muscles I went for it, felt like I was redoing my dissertation we got there in the end and passed with lovely feedback. YES we can do this!
Visa Time – please don’t let this get declined after lots of forms a cool letter in Chinese and a really bad rain swept passport photo off it went and returned with a snazzy passport stamp. The week following this was fun once I had my stamp firmly secured in to my passport it was time to spend a chunk of my savings paying for flights, injections, insurance, wow that was expensive! Poor bank.
So now everything is booked and paid for no backing out and the time is speeding by as I tick the days off the calendar. Started shopping for nice things clothes, shoes, wash bags even treated myself to a new camera and IPad really had to twist my arm for those. Who knew there were so many nik-naks you could get for traveling even bought a silk sleeping envelope yes silk don’t I feel posh.
Overall I’m Excited, nervous intrigued, inspired and absolutely and completely terrified but I’m going to get on that plane pretend to be as brave as everybody keeps telling me I am and I’m going to go see this amazing country meet lots of cool kids to teach scouse to apparently and hopefully have a ball whilst doing it.
As long as the GHD’s work I can take on the world……..They will work wont they?
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Barbara Riley
non-member comment
Good For You!
Hi, just returned from a 15 day whirlwind trip to China and wrote a blog on this site. I am now home in Canada and was checking my blog and came upon yours. I found it very interesting and well written. I was wondering if your were a teacher in England? If you check out my little blog www.mytb.org/ nanaof7 you will see that I am a retired teacher and had often thought it would be a neat thing to do after I retired to teach English in China but after being there, I am too old to do that now. It sounds like you had a fabulous trip and are you home now? I would love to hear from you so perhaps you can comment on my blog. I hope your travels were safe and all is well at the moment- October 30/17