To travel hopelessly

I started teaching in 1983 and it was a very different world.  To Travel Hopelessly looks at Thailand and Korea a decade later. It's a world of weird people and misfits.  I went to South East Asia in 2004 and it wasn't that different from the book, though I was in Cambodia not Thailand. These were the glory days of ESL- people who wanted to travel abroad when there was no internet and globalisation had not hit supermarkets were an asset.  Ten years after I left Portugal, I saw job adverts offering less than when I had been there.

The world ETX describes is another age, where simply being a native speaker in a place was enough to earn a reasonable salary, and it attracted far more than its fair share of oddballs. ESL today is not the Wild West - you earn less and more will be expected of you - but this book is a well-written look at what it was like in those days. It's not the best thing he has written, and I will go through the lot as he sent them to me, but it's a very interesting read.