One of the dilemmas when looking for ESL work overseas is the question, "do I use a recruitment agency, and if so, which one?" The more you look around the 'net, the more confusing it becomes. There's usually at least one dissatisfied or disgruntled teacher slagging every agency out there. And a few hours of reading about people's unhappy experiences, especially in private schools, in China and South Korea can be very off-putting. But this coin has two sides, as the Chinese say -- the Koreans and the Chinese have had to put up with teachers who were immature, naive, parochial, eccentric, unreliable or who were otherwise not the greatest representatives of their home countries.

So folks, obey the visa rules of the country that you're travelling to. If you go abroad with a tourist visa and look for some "under the table" work you will have no recourse if the school stiffs you. In fact, it's a smart idea to obey the laws of the country that you're in. For me, that means honoring my contract and not mounting one-woman protests about aspects of China that I disagree with. For others, that might mean not smoking weed.  For some unknown reason, a 24-year-old ESL teacher recently traveled from South to North Korea, ripped up his visa and asked for asylum. He's now begging to get out as he begins a six year sentence at hard labor. Whatever this young man thought he knew about North Korea, it's clear he didn't know enough.

A few weeks of the new semester under my belt and things are settling in to a new routine. Big advantage -- virtually no commute as we now live on campus. No longer are we awakened by car honking and construction noises. Considering that we live with thousands of young people, the campus is remarkably quiet, especially on weekend mornings.

But every afternoon, for hours on end, some mediocre but fanatically dedicated piano students practice their scales, and there is a flying school nearby and small planes fly overhead frequently. But I'd call it an improvement over the soundscape downtown.

The weather has cooled off and in fact is very pleasant -- great for our bicycle rides. Ross finds that even long bike rides don't bother his knee, whereas walking quickly becomes painful... 

On one of our recent bike excursions, we came across an older mall we hadn't explored yet. I am on a mission to visit every grocery store in town until I find more of  the lemon-and-pomegranate drink that I got one day at a convenience store. So when we saw this mall, Ross knew I was going in.

An interesting feature of several department store/grocery store combos in Zibo is that you must walk through the department store to get to the grocery store. Typically, an escalator takes you up one or two flights to get in to the store, and you work your way through, down and out.  I don't really mind because I am still goggling at everything and of course it's all new for Ross as well. Anyway, we were walking through the clothing department and noticed that -- OMG -- this store had larger sizes, as in sizes that might conceivably, some of them, anyway, might fit Ross's handsome broad-shouldered self and um, me too. (As our assiduous bike riding and stair climbing has not yet won the upper hand over the campaign to sample every variety of Chinese cuisine.)

A year has gone by since I started a second career as an ESL teacher. After a gap of um.... lemme see..... about 35 years, I went back to school and enrolled in the Continuing Studies "Teaching English as a Second Language" certificate course at Okanagan College. 

A year ago I had no idea what would happen next.

Now, a year later, I'm a "foreign expert" living and working in China and beginning my second semester teaching at a vocational institute in Zibo, Shandong Province.

Although I had taught office skills and business English a vocational instructor, I had never really described myself as a teacher. In the months before leaving for China, I was getting up at four in the morning to teach online English lessons to adult learners in China. I was serious about improving my credentials.