As a teacher in Asia, you are generally taking a plane to anywhere you want to go on week-ends thinking you do not have enough time for other modes of transportation. This is, of course, not true.  If you look at a map of Thailand, for example, you see that there is a beautiful city in the north called Chiang Mai. If you happen to be living in Bangkok, for example, you leave school on a Friday afternoon and catch an overnight train to Chiang Mai. The train is a lot of fun and you can buy a sleeper with a private room and bathroom or a room with bunk beds and have a great trip north, save the cost of hotel room for one night, spend a full Saturday and Sunday in the north and come back Sunday night and make a beeline right to school. Hopefully you are either the principal or have an understanding principal in that you might be a few minutes late to class Monday morning. 

The same thing can happen in Ho Chi Minh when you can take a train to almost anywhere in central Vietnam like Da Nang. If you are in Ho Chi Minh City you can also consider taking a bus to Phnom Penh for the week-end and even though it is only five hours away you can take the night bus and end up in Cambodia in the early morning. The only problem with the bus is that you could end up being woken up at the border to do paper work just as you are trying and probably beginning to fall asleep!


Airplanes are also great and quick and cheap but you do have alternatives that might end up being more fun and cheaper. 

Book Review
It All Started in Mandalay

I just wish I had read it before I spent several ex-patriate years in West Africa!


In addition to recommending it to members of the teaching profession working abroad, I would like to say that  Michael Allan Charles' book, "It All Started in Mandalay," should be  read by anyone  about to lead an ex-pat existence.

This book shows, in a delightful way, how  navigating the intricacies of a foreign culture as a temporary or long-term resident is a major factor in ensuring subsequent happiness/minimising misfortune. 

Michael's observational skills are matched only by his ability to recount what he has seen and understood so well.

You can read this review and others on Amazon and I thank you Gideon for writing this. Hey, why not read the book for yourself and tell me and other readers what you think! You can get the book at Amazon, Kobo, Friesen Press etc. so you have no excuse  not to read it and by reading it you will make my day and hopefully yours!

If you live in Asia you can buy the book at Asiabooks.

I know I am getting about 100 "hits" a day on this blog,  but I have no idea where you are located. If you are living in Asia, I am thrilled to tell you that AsiaBooks is now carrying the soft cover version of my book It All Started in Mandalay and I would love you to go out and buy it right now! Luckily they are carrying the second edition where I have added about thirty pages of dialogue so I am sure it is a more interesting read than the first edition, or so my readers have told me.

If you are one of the North American readers of this blog, slide over the right column and buy the book from Freisen Press or any other of your favourite retailers. It gives me a lot of satisfaction when you write and let me know how you enjoyed the book. In fact, it makes my day. If the book sales on any particular day are slow I simply go for a walk and usually see something like this.

If you want to be here, just check out some of my blogs to find out how to get a teaching job in Asia!
Good luck.

I do not mean marrying east and west as in this picture, but if we can marry the work the Asians bring to their work with the western approach to problem solving and creativity we would be creating a super race of human beings.

As I study the Asian curriculum in more and more Asian countries, I have come to a starling conclusion that much of it is based on simple rote learning. There are copious amounts of content and students must "cover" all of the content to regurgitate on exams but there is little effort made to analyze and synthesize information

In Asia, you will often see a factory filling a truck with workers all wearing the same colour shirt as their workplace. The trucks are usually so full of workers I cannot believe they can breath . I have been told, usually at the golf course by western executives, that the Thai workers, as one example, are better workers than the Japanese, but when they get promoted they invariably fail because they never learned how to work in groups or think for themselves. Creativity is not highly valued. 

so I figure all you can do as a western teacher, if you are one, is to push the envelope, encourage your students to think outside of the box and do the best you can, realizing that we are teaching kids for jobs that do not even exist as of this moment in history. 

...and if you can't marry east and west, perhaps you can just DANCE a little so that the two cultures can at least meet!

Good luck. The pity is that both sides have so much to offer and so little opportunity to make it happen. That is what teaching in Asia is what about actually, in my opinion. Not to say the picture below is not an incentive to come and work here!

Hey, want a job in Thailand? Have these posts whetted your appetite to teach in Asia?  A great school on the island of Phuket is hiring teachers at all levels right now for the year beginning in May.... Interested?

Send an email to hr@kajonkietsuksa.ac.th and speak with Mike, the head of HR. Tell him Mike sent you, the author of It All started in Mandalay. He will tell you what positions are open, how much they pay and so on. If you like to teach and you like to live in paradise, this is a hard combination to turn down!!!

Good luck!!