You'll go to places you never would otherwise
2023-08-23
Share
One of the joys of teaching English in China, in particular, is the extensive and convenient high speed rail network. You can hop on a train for fairly cheap and be somewhere new and exciting in a couple of hours. I dare say this is true for a lot of places where people are sent to teach English. My advice is to seek out the small towns and villages foreigners would never go to otherwise.
I've visited gorgeous parts of Guizhou and Hunan that are somewhat hard to get to. If I wasn't already in China, I would never have gone through the hassle of buying a 1,000 USD flight, sitting for 15 hours on a plane, transferring to a closer airport and getting a train or bus to a hotel just to see a waterfall. Luckily I didn't have to.
Further, depending on where you teach, either in a public school or a private training centre, you may have a schedule very amenable to travel. If you have the summer off or the lengthy break for a national festival you can really get stuck into the country in which you're living.
Travelling is an endless redrawing of the proverbial line-in-the-sand of your expectations. What you think is normal will change very quickly. Eating boiled pig brain or standing throughout a four-hour train ride will seem like a normal part of life.
Latest Career Advice
Search for your dream job
Job category
City or country