[Felix]

since i count on you guys to know things like this, and because i'm incrasingly desperate for ideas in the way of what, exactly, to do with myself-

what are my chances, as an american halfway to a bachelor's degree, of getting hired someplace in korea or india to teach english for the summer?

[Lurky]

For Korea you need a visa to work
you need a degree for the visa

[Broco]

I don't have much personal knowledge of these countries, but googling yields these useful pages:

http://www.transitionsabroad.com/listings/work/esl/articles/workinasia.shtml
http://www.responsibletravel.com/Trip/Trip900121.htm
http://www.canuckabroad.com/overseasjobs/korea/visa.shtml
http://www.expatfocus.com/expatriate-india-employment

To summarize these:
- As Lurky says, you can't work in Korea because you don't have a bachelor's degree.
- You can work in India but you can't expect to be paid much if anything.
- Consider some of the other Asian countries listed in that first guide.

[Sushi K]

Oxford Seminars TESOL/TESL will get you certified to teach English in some countries.
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[alice]

There are private institutions in Asian countries desperately looking for white people to apply for a job. They might not require a degree.

[Rud31]

Korea? Uhm..fuck. A phone call and they'll mail you a ticket. If you have a degree.
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[Broco]

In any event, I don't know if it's such a great idea to drop your studies to go work. It's so easy never to get back to it after that. Better to stick through for another year or two even if you're starting to have questions about where your life is going, and worry later. Of course I don't know your circumstances though.

[Scofflaw]

My cousin is teaching in Korea right now. She likes it okay, but she says it's more work than she expected. Being that she was the valedictorian of her high school, that could mean one of two things: there is an absolute tidal wave of work to be done, or she imposes a lot of extra work on herself.

I have a feeling it's the latter.

edit: she's not signing on for a second year, so take that how you will.
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[Felix]

[Felix]

so as to reinvigorate this topic-

is there.. anyplace i could expect to be hired to teach for the summer? i'm really desperate for any alternative to this cushy, $11/hr state job in the middle of bumfuck nowhere.

[Felix]

fuck it. i was already planning to waste a couple grand with one of these immediately after graduating next spring; i'm financially okay enough (as long as i can successfully sublet the last couple months of my lease) to do it this summer instead.

and then maybe i'll go teach in korea after i've actually got the BA.

[Toptube]

one of my friends (who has an A.A.) is teaching english to kindergarten students in a suburb about an hour out of Kobe. the school immediately hired him without much grilling, and sponsored his Visa.

[Felix]

somebody tell me because i have no idea- after playing around with various air travel websites, the best price i seem to be able to get on a round trip to any major city in continental europe is right around a grand.

is this acceptable?

[falsedan]

That is about the price for a one-way ticket from Sydney to London

Aer Lingus flies JFK to Dublin for about $700, and from there RyanAir will get you places on the cheap. RyanAir's aircraft are flying buses and they charge for bags, but my boss flies with them a lot so I dunno how crap they are… gonna be flying with them in a month to Riga
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[Felix]

having compared prices between bradley in CT versus JFK, it seems like i'd definitely be saving money no matter what kind of favors i've got to call in to get driven into manhattan, so there is that.

you said $700 to london is pretty dirt cheap; should i consider a round trip at a grand to be a deal, then?

[luckystrike]

I just did a quick search at student universe (studentuniverse.com) (JFK to London from May 1 to May 29 [just some random summer dates]) and found roundtrip airfare for $552. That also includes all the taxes and fees.

As long as you are currently enrolled in a college then you are eligible for the fares. For almost all of the summer dates I checked, I found the fare to be much less expensive than a grand.

Best of luck!

[falsedan]

yeah that ~$700 was a return JFK <-> Dublin. One-way with Aer Lingus is about $250 + taxes ($50ish). $1000 to London isn't the cheapest! Actually AL have an offer for cheap flights to/from the US for the next two months, so a JFK-Dublin return is more like $600.

Also if you are flying into a country, check their national airline's prices and their budget airline (if they have one). They will have secured the best routes into that country's cities, with the most flights & reasonable price. RyanAir will be cheaper than anyone, but that's because they cut corners on comfort and often fly into secondary airports up to 100 miles from your actual destination.

As a starting off point for a eurail pass, Dublin is a poor choice (since it has no one rail link to another country. Book far enough in advance and it's easy to get a cheap fares to places (£16 to London, yo)
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[Felix]

[falsedan]

book book book
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[Felix]

oh my god i'm fucking eight hundred and thirty dollars poorer and i'm going to europe

[Felix]

guys am i kidding

i'm going to be fucking couchsurfing(dot com) in europe for two months

wow

any of you in continental europe with above-average amounts of local pride and hospitality want to put me up for a week? i still have to figure out which five countries i want my eurail pass to apply to, and based on whether i go with the 8-day ($470) or the 10-day ($520) train pass.. i am going to have to pick approximately two cities per country to spend a week or so in each.

[Felix]

ok guys at this point i'm pretty much married to france, germany, and switzerland, leaning towards amsterdam, and can't for the life of me decide yes or no on italy.

[Felix]

so i know i'm the only one posting in this thread but i need some serious help with italy.

i am half itatlian.

never, in my life, have i cared much for italian persons or italian food.

i have an unbelievably difficult time telling myself "i will not visit itatly on this trip."

somebody help.

[Rud31]

Go to Greece instead!
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[falsedan]

In the beginning of summer, greece and italy will both be pretty hot. In my subjective experience, greece sucks (especially athens), italy is awesome if you stay north of Roma

skip switzerland and go to vienna instead, it is so far east you can get a short ticket (not on your eurail pass) to budapest for a few euros. see ex-communism, visit the park where all the soviet statues were moved to!
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[Felix]

greece is.. too far out there. i don't want to have to account for that much travel time, nor do i want to feel so isolated from the rest of the trip.

i have heard from most people that switzerland and austria are in most respect interchangeable for a trip like this. so i guess i'm flexible on that one.

i could certainly do, like, florence (milan?) and venice in italy. i still haven't figured out where i want to go in the south of france - i'm sure i'll get too much advice on this, if anything - and i can't decide whether i'll actually enjoy amsterdam, which is frustrating because there's nothing for me to do between now and june but change my mind about that every day.

[Takashi]

You will enjoy Amsterdam. I've yet to meet someone (european) that didn't.
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[Felix]

ok, current itinerary:

1. paris
2. lyons, nice, or marseilles (possibly 2 of 3)
3. milan or florence
4. venice
5. zurich or vienna
6. munich
7. berlin
8. amsterdam
9. bruges

and back to paris.

[CubaLibre]

You're screwing yourself by leaving Rome out of it.
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[Felix]

it's not.. too touristy? i feel like venice is already enough of a concession to out and out sightseeing.

(not the act thereof; the place itself)

[sam]

[Felix]

in some respects, i don't doubt you.

on the other hand, i can't shake the idea that i'd like to actually see.. life, rather than see sights. and i just can't imagine that i am an italy sort of person.

[CubaLibre]

[Felix]

that's exactly it; i think of myself as wanting to see REAL ____ LIFE (maybe even in the interest of getting myself a new REAL LIFE) but italian doesn't enter into that equation for a minute.

i could probably be talked into rome. i am probably being talked into rome.

[CubaLibre]

bias report: I lived for six weeks more or less on my own in Rome, so.

I lived like five blocks north of the Vatican and it was 100% eyetalian. Not a tourist in sight.

As a whole, I've never seen a city so beautiful. Period. Florence was nice but it was all Renaissance and nothing else. Rome is like the entire history of Western art unfolding before your eyes (except I suppose for ultramodern). Like, there's no marble on the Pantheon's exterior because it was literally stripped for concrete in medeival times. It's sort of a "shame" archaeologically speaking, but it's intensely beautiful to see a city in the process of reusing itself to express new artistic ideas. In some cases you can literally see the evolution (Coloseum cross-section for example). And on top of it, Rome is an actual city, analogous to New York here. It's not a frozen cultural artifact like so many other European and Italian cities. It's got a population of 3 million people who live and work there. Life doesn't stop and start for tourists. Most people don't speak English because they're not beholden to you to support their economy. It's lovely to subsume yourself in that rhythm.

Anyway, uh, there's no other city like it, not even other Italian cities, which are nice I guess. Venice is way more touristy than my opinion, and sort of a one-trick pony. Still worth visiting, though.

Also: try learning a little Italian! Some European countries frown on yanks trying to bumble their way through their language, but Italians (Romans at least) really appreciate it. You don't have to take classes or anything, just a pronunciation guide (it's easy) and a pocket dictionary will do well. I did everything I needed to do basically talking like a caveman (all nouns and adjectives, no grammar) but people still liked me.
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[falsedan]

felix, do you like:
eating
drinking
piña coladas
walks in the rain
having a good time
?

then you will like italy

There is a bunch of roman stuff in rome, it's pretty neat, but the spanish steps suck STAY AWAY

venice is weird, people actually live there and there are builders doing construction. I went in time for the international art festival, that was good. Try walking around the place late at night, try finding parks and gardens, try drawing a map, or just sit on a vaporetto all day

by the time I got to paris, I was too burnt out on ex-roman-empire cities to really care about it.

do you like museums? florence has heaps! get accommodation out of town and catch the bus in and out, see italian driving on the autostrada first hand

vienna is good. Go see the Klimt mural in the museum art-deco, then get thai food from the fish markets (in a landlocked country). I stayed in here

start practising german in vienna and get used to biergartens, because munich is full of them

munich is fun, more museums. see the treasury in the residentz (but not the rest, takes too long), see Schloss Nymphenburg. Taxisgarten (near Gern station) is the beer garden I went to the most, it is lively but never full, bit intimidating at first but overall excellent. pick up beers from the monestary window and give euros to the lady until she lets you go. Go for walks in the olympic park or the englischer gartens; the biergartens are positioned just so that as you get tired or walking, one is nearby.

Compare supermarkets in different countries, wear the same shoes and jeans until they fall to bits, write lots of lots of postcards with very little content.

That is about all of the intersection of my europe experiences and your plan! don't visit england, it is not that exciting. go to scotland instead
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[Felix]

okay let's see here as a response to the last two (very generous and very much appreciated) posts:

1. i am a miserable linguist (despite being a linguistics student); the only non-english language i have ever managed to learn with any success is latin, which equates to my being able to functionally understand most any european language but not come close to speaking or writing them in most cases. believe me, i have been trying. i will keep trying.

2. my eurail pass doesn't cover the UK, so i won't be headed up there anyway. it covers ireland, so in theory i could hop into GB if i felt like it, but.. same logic as with greece; i don't think i'll be going, and besides the pound would ream me worse than the euro. likewise i'm afraid i'll miss scotland.

3. fucking fine i'm already sold on rome are you happy

4. owing to any degree of disgust with the culture in and around which i have grown up (not to sound elitist / deliberately contrarian; i'm exaggerating on purpose in order to make a point, see: why i want to take this trip in the first place), re: drinking- i do not do it. i smoke pot about six days a week, adding up to something like a gram per every three or four weeks, which i am afraid makes me not very much fun. two months in europe may yet make me go back on this (and, for that matter, vegetarianism); such as i am, though.

5. i've been wearing the same shoes and jeans for years/months (respectively) already. no plans to stop doing this i assure you.

6. for better or for worse, i am easily most excited for france.

7. keep talking to me about vienna > zurich.

[CubaLibre]

woo hoo for rome salesmanship

If you don't drink wine you will dehydrate in Italy. Seriously unless you just always drink water (which is fine I guess, my girlfriend does it) you are missing out on 50% of Italian culture by not having a glass of the house red everywhere you eat. It's cheaper than any other beverage (have you ever been to Europe? I forget but if you haven't soda's expensive) and good lord is it delicious.

Beer is Germany's wine, I'd get used to that too if you're going.

Basically, the point is that drinking in those countries is social and it's integral to the food palette. (Well, in northern Europe it's half social and half binge, that's where we Americans get our binging tendencies from, but this reasoning still applies.) You're not going to appreciate the cuisine as much if you don't drink the same stuff every single other person drinks while eating the cuisine. They're interdependent.
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[Felix]

yeah, i don't drink soda either. we'll see i guess.

[falsedan]

can you imaging 300 people drinking in a garden
can you imagine not shouting to be heard
imaging a family turning up with a cake and holding their son's birthday party in the biergarten, complete with 5-year-olds playing in the sandpit
now, in that vision, imaging also that they are all catholic
that is a munich biergarten

bavarian drinking culture is more similar to café culture than pub culture. certainly if you visit at the end of september you will be surrounded by lager louts, but the rest of the summertime it is just germans drinking german beer in the german fashion. also a half litre of weissbier with a pretzel is decidedly tasty!

that is all I can do to convince you to visit a biergarten and have a german beer. also as well as biergartens, munich has lots of shoe shops, as does vienna

I have never been to zurich, I think my brother went there to cater for a car show, I will ask him tomorrow (I went to vienna with him, he can provide an unbiased view. Switzerland has strange money and cheap cigarettes and mountains nobody lives in. I crossed the alps at brenner pass training from munich to venice so that is where I got my impressions from. Also a friend of mine went to boarding school in geneva for 2 years and thinks switzerland is the stupid place on earth

if you were hypothetically coming to the sunny british isles, I would recommend scotland over england (well london really). Does your eurail pass have to have contiguous travel? a train from london to edinburgh could be as low as £14 (plus US$80 for the eurostar) if you booked now

I wasn't in the mood for france. I was looking forward to riding the TGVs, and I fell asleep as soon as I boarded...

I got through my travels knowing a chunk of german, and learning "hello, goodbye, that one please, thank you, excuse me, yes, no, 1 2 3 4 5" in the romance languages. now I am learning estuary and cockney, it's hard, innit
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[falsedan]

felix good news there are drinking water fountains everywhere in italy and in some places in paris and everywhere in spain. holy shit spain! spain is awesome

also stay the hell away from mediterranean beaches, I thought coogee beach in sydney was a bit grotty until I went for a swim in the ligurian sea
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