UK yet NOT

Being a brit abroad, through choice, one has a certain amount of baggage which must be clarified. Why leave your shores, what attracts you to other climes etc. This will be a running theme, but for now I include my best response to a mate who travelled from UK to Saigon to teach and was feeling a little melancholoy on day 1 in the Nam. 

It could be worse -- you could be here. Today, it rained steadily all day. Needless to say it was not tropical rain but wind whipped drizzle which seemed to wash the very colour out of the world. I taught academic reading for 4 and a quarter hours. The subject was statistics. Just before lunch, I handed back some essay marks. An Iranian man in his forties apologised for having failed to write in paragraphs. He told me that three of his colleagues had died in an industrial accident on the day of the test. In his faltering and barely adequate English he made it know that he was the kind of man who cries when his daughter 'has a headache'. Tears were welling up in his eyes as he struggled to make it known that although he had been reflecting on a personal tragedy, this was no excuse for his poor performance. He had, he said, let me down. At lunchtime a new and highly annoying teacher turned up. He finks he's witty. He ain't. However, this little fact seems to be lost on the other members of staff who encourage him by tittering uncontrollably at the humourless dross that passes for his quips. After lunch the bulb in the overhead burnt out during a vocab pre-teach task for a highly complex text. I was up until mid-night last night making the overheads. They proved to be useless. Went to safeways after work to get some shopping where I was stalked by teenage mums with unfeasibly large prams and a litter of bejewelleried 'will be criminals'. When I say stalked, I mean that they seemed to appear at the end of every aisle in hoplite formation thus blocking my exit and forcing me to brush against their sweaty tereline bodies in order to pass. Like I said, it could be worse -- you could be here. Hope this has helped -- keep on keeping in touch.