Back for Christmas

It's nearing Christmas 2012. I'm sitting in the living room at Mum and Dad's, drinking beer and watching the test cricket on TV. The jetlag has just about worked its way through, and I am about to arrive mentally in the east Australian timezone, almost a week after my flight touched down last Tuesday. Budapest - Eindhoven - Amsterdam - Seoul - Sydney - Mittagong. My creative spark is at a low, so I'm gonna enter this update rather prosaically. I entered Europe on May 15 and was collected by my friend Elise. I spent a week or so looking around her place in Haarlem before we headed off to the south of France. We stayed in Reims on the way, then arrived in the Dordogne region the next day, spending a week with her aunt and uncle. On the way back to Holland, Elise dropped me in Picardie and I spent a week exploring the WWI battlefields on bicycle.

Back in Holland, I readied myself for the trip to Budapest by rail. This was an exciting prospect - a journey straight through the heart of Europe at a relaxed pace. At the other end was the heat of Budapest and a teacher training course known as the CELTA. The course took a month and was tough work indeed, but it set me up for the life I've been living since then, as an English teacher in the Hungarian capital. It hasn't been easy; I've found it stressful at times, and even now that my timetable is good, I'm still working long hours to earn enough to get by. But I am finally deriving a feeling of satisfaction from teaching in BP. The opportunities for professional development are good, and I like the vast majority of my motivated students.