No curve was too sharp for them and their bicycle. No puddle was deep enough to stop them. -- Friends by Helme Hein

18 February, 2008

London

We've come to accept that flying from anywhere to Sarajevo will take us at least 12 hours. We were excited to have our first direct flight into Sarajevo on British Airways--only 2 1/2 hours flying time and we would be home with time to chill out. But, of course, something has to go wrong. 4 stops on the tube turned into an hour long train ride, which made us miss our Gatwick train. Thus, we missed our flight. 8 hours and $550 later (each!) we got a flight to Zagreb and then to Sarajevo. So long ease of travel...

The recruitment fair was an intense and exhausting whirlwind. After making connections with a number of schools, we scheduled 8 interviews for Friday starting at 9 and ending at 5. We interviewed with schools in Egypt, Japan, The Netherlands, France, Italy and Germany. It was a positive day and we felt like we had many job offers ahead of us. On Saturday, we were disappointed not to get our Holy Grail job, but we did walk away with 5 job offers--2 of which we are really interested in--one in The Netherlands and one in Tokyo. We are currently debating the pros and cons of each, but hopefully we'll have a decision soon.

The best thing that came out of this job fair was the exposure to different schools, administrations and curriculums. We learned a lot about what we want to see in a school and what we want to be as teachers. We even bumped into a few Oregonians--amazing how you can pick them out of a crowd in London!

We didn't get a lot of time to explore London, but we did find some time to eat curry, drink Strongbow Cider (for me) and Guinness (for James), enjoy the parks and spend double for everything we bought. London is painfully expensive.

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