Pre-course feeding

Welcome back from your summer holiday. OK, welcome back from my summer holiday. It's been a while. If you did go away I hope you had a lovely time. And if you didn't, I hope you live in the south of England and have been able to get a tan regardless. I've spent most of the last two months either away or organising myself for when I will be away. I felt it necessary as an antidote to six months at home existing on a dangerous cocktail of anxiety, anticipation and general professional confusion. I also love the travelling thing; it came with the degree so I don't see it as my fault at all if I can't resist Ryanair's so-called low fares. I am aware of the tax deception but by the time I have got to that stage of the online search form where it generates the final cost of your flight after fuel tax, luggage tax, foot room tax, annoying announcement tax as well as a tax for just looking at the in-flight menu, I have convinced myself that paying 100 quid for a flight that was advertised as 25 really isn't such a great deception because the mere act of filling in the form has got me so excited about foreign climes. The addiction isn't my fault; you are required to spend the third year of a modern languages degree abroad so that when you finish the four year course you are walking away not only with a degree certificate but an urgent desire to itch the soles of your feet. Anyway at least I'll fit in with all the other students; it'll be nice to share our experiences of backpacking over a cheap student cider...Won't it? No, from the point of view of a second-time young professional what it's really been about has been training my body to adapt to the six week holiday in preparation for what my new vocation has in store holiday-wise. Yeah, that's it. Well, whatever my excuse and despite the fact that it's bankrupted me, it's been good to get away and join the working population on their annual summer-time Ryanair flight. Makes you feel like you're back in the race. YES! I'M NORMAL AGAIN! I'M WONDERFULLY, SQUISHABLY AVERAGE! It's been a while since I felt like I was doing what everyone else was doing. Amazing what unemployment makes you crave.

I won't go into great detail about my holidays. I don't gloat. So, in summary:

Holiday season began with a week in a spa hamlet in the darkest depths of the Languedoc-Roussillon region of France. My travelling partner (a good friend who has officially acquired that title after the French trip became our fifth adventure together) and I decided that we were going to go back to botching together our own holiday since the Lanzagrotty package deal experience left us feeling used, empty and, if we're honest, a little dirty. This sort of do-it-yourself holiday has often been referred to in travel supplements as 'going organic', which is just a fancy word for not relying on some inept travel agent to do it for you - there's really no need to create another verb to make doing something on your own appear to be a grand gesture of making an effort. Anyway, for us this meant hiring a car and exploring the area for ourselves. Before heading out there, we filled our heads with dreams of sweeping around rural French roads in a old Renault convertible. (How wonderfully pretentious) However, we arrived to find ourselves in the airport car park walking towards a Renault Kangoo Be Bop, which is about as far from the old convertible version as the designers could have managed. I don't know anything about cars but a vehicle that looks like a hearse cannot be a great design move. While there was lots of space for your head, there was very little for any other body part, nevermind the luggage. And so, our two-tone hearse became our jokemobile and, in the end, the amusement far outweighed the crapness. We found beaches, cafes, more cafes and a lovely place called Carcassonne where we pranced around the ramparts of a medieval castle. It was lovely. I discovered that I have to really try not to comment on other people's driving and that I have a real cheek in doing so in the first place since I seem to have a habit of ignoring all road markings myself, including the STOP sign at junctions. However, we found the perfect antidote to driving anxiety in bottled beer, which we consumed in large quantities while playing cards in our sperm-scented rented flat. Yes, you read right. It was a lovely flat, decked out in Ikea's best. With just one problem. It stunk to high heaven. And a very unfortunate comparison was drawn. So, we spent our days driving around breaking all manner of European motoring laws, and in the evening we settled down to play cards, drink beer and give ourselves future health problems by eating far too much cheese, all the while trying to forget we were sitting in a flat which smelt of youknowwhat.


The next was a more intriguing jaunt all the way over to Hungary and Romania. A friend who had spent a year teaching English in Romania a few years ago invited me along with her on her return visit. I had no idea what to expect from the trip but curiosity combined with the promise of a country in which good restaurant food costs half the price of bad restaurant food in the UK tipped the balance in favour of an Eastern European adventure. (It's hard to convey the richness of the countries we visited in a paragraph preceded by sperm-related holiday anecdotes but I'm going to attempt anyway). The bare bones of the trip were four days in Budapest and six-ish days in Romania, based in a city in north-western Transylvania called Cluj. The places we visited were incredibly beautiful and I became an obsessive photographer of buildings. Buildings, buildings, buildings - I couldn't get enough of them. A cornice, a roof, a windowsill, I photographed them all. Obviously I ate a lot. The schnitzel was pretty good in Budapest and everything was good in Romania so I stocked up for the winter. But all of this frivolity and over-indulgence was punctuated by sharp glimpses into the fairly recent histories of these countries of the former Communist bloc.


On first glance, Cluj in August was like any other balmy European city at that time of year with people sitting out on terraces sipping the same cafe au laits I had been drinking a couple of weeks before in the middle England of France. But these were people who, only twenty years ago and when they were probably kids or teenagers, witnessed the end of the Ceausescu regime. If a walk along the main streets revealed few signs from that era, a visit to the city's department store certainly proved the point. As my friend and I wandered around the greyish looking Women's Fashion floor, wading through the empty floor space to get to the first clothes rail only to encounter a variety of garments seemingly not from this time and hung from yellowing plastic models more reminiscent of 1950s England, it was a superficial reminder of the kind of country I was meandering through so nonchalantly. Out of the department store, however, what we encountered were the kind of amusing cultural disparities to be found in most foreign countries beyond the familiar Western European holiday resorts; traffic was stopped while a workmen jovially performed an emergency repair on an overhead tram cable which had just fallen to the floor as if knackered after a day holding itself up, I ate food I have NEVER heard of let alone seen, I came into contact with more animals than is the norm in my life (resulting in an unfortunate incident where I ended up on the receiving end of a gassy expulsion from a horse's backside) and I ripped the skin from my throat after assuming I could knock back some Romanian plum brandy like the locals. As always, the tourists come off worse.



One happy coincidence was that I came into contact with quite a few English teachers (my friend's contacts from her stint as a teacher there). They were, in the main, the most enthusiastic bunch of teachers I had met. I wondered if this was something to do with the fact that learning English would be such a vital part of the lives of the young people they taught and so was taken much more seriously by them and their students. For the students, it wasn't simply a subject to be picked up and dropped whenever the fancy took them; it was in many cases a determiner of their futures. I'm no expert but that's my hunch. In the light of these observations, what was so astonishing was the bitterly low salary these teachers were receiving. I was told that a teacher's wage was not enough to afford a monthly rental of any sort. It must take a lot to maintain that professional enthusiasm. I began to cook up grand plans of dragging hoards of British Modern Languages teachers over to Romania for some sort of professional exchange, slash damn good lesson. One step at a time.

I begin the long-awaited course of study in just over a week. Monday 7th September is the date. Etched into my brain. If any of you have been following this online journal of my musings and bruisings over the last six months then you will have some idea of what a relief this is to me. I hope to continue this blog into next year and, even though I have been warned by former PGCEers that this is a tall order due to the mountains of work I am to encounter, I've sort of committed myself to it now. So I'm doing it, alright? I always liked a challenge. Of course, this coming year is the year of the great 'PGCE Surge' so I'm hoping to meet lots of ex-bankers, ex-lawyers, redundees and sufferers of disillusionment. What a loony bin it could be.