ENgLiSH TEaCHER X: RAmBlinGS

WORKING IN DISNEYLAND: PRAGUE 2000



The new millenium had come without massive computer-related disaster, terrorist attacks, biblical armageddon, or indeed incident of any sort other than a lot of large parties.

I had survived the Koh Phanghan Millenium beach party. Never mind all that crap about how the Millenium REALLY started in 2001. Horseshit. Just look at all the zeros in 2000, and tell me that’s not a good reason to get drunk.

Koh Phangan is an island on the east coast of Thailand, famous for its all-night Full Moon parties. On December 31st, 1999, ten thousand or so other people and I got wasted on the beach and danced as Western Civilization’s odometer ticked over to 2000.

It was good. I kissed a lot of girls. At 12:00, they turned off all the lights and music on the beach to frighten us, then turned them back on. Like in that Jennifer Lopez video.

January first, 2000, saw me making my way painfully back to Ko Samui by boat. I made it back to my small hut by 3:00pm that day. I laid on the bed, vibrating from the amphetamines I’d taken the night before, listening to the fan whir, the lizards chirp, the rain patter on the leaves of the coconut trees, the scooters zip past on the road nearby.

Finally I gave up trying to sleep and walked into the village. All the electricity was still working, but that was no surprise – most of it was powered by generators. I stopped at an Internet cafe and looked on MSN.com. Nothing in the way of a major disaster anywhere in the world. Apparently very little even in the way of clerical or billing errors. If God had rendered judgment, He’d done it in private.

Well. What a disappointment.

Okay. So. Then. The new millenium. Time to get to Prague.

“English teaching in Prague” always had something of the mythical about it to me. It was up there with El Dorado, or Shangri La. When I went on my first backpacking voyage around Europe in 1992, Prague had only recently opened up. The Cold War had ended, and Capitalism had emerged victorious! Everyone was talking about going there. The city of Kafka, of Kundera, and really cheap beer. “I’m going to teach English in Prague!” was the cry of a generation.

I spent five days there in 1992. I remember a city of great medieval beauty where it was raining constantly. I remember not being able to find my way anywhere, streets changing names and winding through centuries-old plazas. I remember people being constantly rude to me, and a ticket inspector taking $8 from me as a fine because I’d bought the wrong kind of ticket. I remember trying to buy a pen and being unable to find one anywhere.

In truth I did very little during my five days in Prague in 1992. I don’t think I even went to any bars, because I could never find them. Also I was totally exhausted from five days in Bulgaria and Romania in which I’d slept very little and spent most of my time fighting my way through long lines at train stations.

But I always thought I’d be going back soon. Somehow it didn’t quite happen.

In December of 1999 I was on the island of Ko Samui in Thailand. I’d been working on another island in Thailand, but had lost my job under a cloud. I relaxed and swam and waited for the Millenium. I also spent about an hour every evening at an Internet Cafe, looking for a new teaching position. I decided it would be somewhere in Eastern Europe or Russia. Time for a change. I’d done Asia to death. I scanned websites, sent out resumes, followed up leads, posted messages. Technology. In my first three jobs I’d just had to turn up in a city and hope for the best.

I got an offer to work in Sarajevo that excited me a bit, until I foolishly admitted that I didn’t have a CELTA. Well fuck you too. The first concrete offer I got was for a large school in Prague. Good old Prague! Like returning to Mecca. And surely the easiest first stop if you wanted to see Eastern Europe.

I spoke on the telephone to a DOS of the school there. He seemed friendly, yet very professional. Well, no problem. I’d been an English teacher for nearly five years, I could fake professionalism as well as the next bozo. They offered me a job, starting January 6th.

I bought my plane ticket and assured them I’d be there, if the world didn’t end.

It hadn’t.

But it was a long damn road to Prague.

I left Ko Samui on January 2nd, still hungover from the New Millenium party. Taxi to the port. Ferry to the mainland. Overnight bus ride to Bangkok. Checked into a hostel, slept uncomfortably. Spent the day buying some odds and ends. Bus to the airport in the afternoon. On the evening of the 3rd, onto the plane. Six or seven hours to Bahrain. A long stopover there, and then back onto the plane and into Prague some six or seven hours later.

I arrived in the afternoon. A nice Czech woman from the school met me. From palm trees and sun to snow and castles, plus jetlag. It was all a bit of shock. I’d taken the last of my blue valiums on the airplane, but sedation doesn’t exactly equal sleep. To describe me as “frazzled” would be putting it mildly.

They put me in my flat – a huge grey Soviet concrete block. The flat was brown and smelled of generations of cheap tobacco. But the TV did have Fashion TV, MTV and Animal Planet. My room was small and filled with Czech books and houseplants. I had a roomate, but he wasn’t there. I was a little afraid. I hadn’t lived with anybody since college. I collapsed into bed that afternoon and slept restlessly all night to the next morning.

I got up early the next day for my first day of work. I put on a blue shirt and tie and trousers, still feeling exhausted despite all my sleep. It was still dark. I crept into the shower, hearing my mysterious roommate snore in his room. I went outside and made the ten-minute trek to the school by bus and metro. Greyness, brownness, coldness, and darkness formed my first impressions.

The school was empty when I arrived. I envisioned the staff room in Bangkok in the morning, filling slowly with hungover teachers smoking, bantering about the night before and drinking coffee. I looked forward to meeting the very professional-sounding individual who interviewed me on the telephone. He had sounded like an interesting guy.

Imagine my surprise when he turned out to be a hairless gorilla.

He was the first arrival. He was wearing ratty jeans and a t-shirt as I recall. He introduced me to the manager of the school, who spoke in such a thick accent he couldn’t be understood at all. Then to the other DOS’s, who were mostly bloated football hooligans, misshapen and swollen from years of Czech beer and potato pancakes.

Then the teachers arrived. They were mostly unattractive women in their twenties who immediately began complaining about everything and preparing for their classes – this consisted of making six hundred photocopies of twenty different activities and then cutting them all up into little pieces. I’d never seen so much preparation. Pretty much everyone was wearing ratty jeans and sweaters.

I quietly took off my tie and slipped it into my jacket pocket. I figured I was haggard and weary enough looking to fit in otherwise.

Welcome to the world of the professional trained ESL teacher in Europe.

I tried hard enough to be friendly at first. Nobody had much nice to say about the school, or about Prague. The majority of them didn’t even go out or drink much, and had been under the misapprehension that they were going abroad for a cultural experience. Most of them were British and complained about the service in Prague, their flats, the rudeness of the people. The Americans all complained about their massive college loan debts. “Uh, so why did you come here to work then?” I asked them. “For the experience,” was the general answer.

I blame the Internet, personally. It’s made it to easy for people with no affinity for travel to go abroad and work. After, of course, paying a few thousand bucks for a certificate course.

Fortunately my roommate turned out to have a sense of humor, unlike most of the others. He’d been in Prague about four months. We hooked up with a couple of other like-minded individuals quickly enough and explored Prague’s nightlife with energy, though we constantly got lost and ended up wandering around medieval streets looking for obscure bars in the freezing cold. After enough beer we didn’t mind.

Prague itself had come more to resemble Medieval World at Disneyland than anything else. It was no longer difficult to find pens, or anything else. The streets of the center were constantly full of drunk tourists and locals only rarely ventured there. Particularly unpleasant did I find the skankily –dressed Eurotrash Italian men, but the British and Germans had little to recommend them. Most of the Americans living there had artistic delusions, acted out in unbearably pretentious coffee shops and book shops. At last count there were around 759 different novels about young Americans turning their back on the consumerism of American society to go teach English in Prague and find themselves. Most of the people writing them were on parental trust funds and never taught English.

Still, I can’t say it’s not a fun place, and certainly beautiful. There’s an unmistakable pleasure in getting drunk and falling down on cobblestones, and maybe peeing on a 500-year-old building.

The day after our first binge, my roomate said, “We had a great time last night, but we spent a fucking fortune.”

“A fortune? I think I only spent about $20.”

He shook his head. “You’ve got to get used to the economy here, mate.”

I shrugged. I’d never had trouble saving a bit of money, in any of my jobs. I’d even come out ahead in Bangkok and New York, something not many people can say.

The schedule was typical – unpleasant. Classes started as early as 7:30, and ended as late as 8:00, with a long day in the middle. Split shift hell, three or four days a week. The nicest thing was that there were few classes on Friday afternoon or evening, which meant the weekend could get started appropriately early in the day.

I had a number of “outdoor” jobs – mostly banks and offices in the center. I spent some time on the trams and subway, but it wasn’t too bad, really – some people I worked with had to travel as much as an hour on the train. The students were nice enough – they had a hell of a lot more to say than the Thais or Koreans at any rate.

The school, however, had the absolute worst atmosphere of any school I’ve ever worked at. The staff was bitchy, unhappy and gossipy. The bloated sinister apes in charge were rarely helpful. Teachers were afraid to go into the crowded, hectic staffroom, for fear of being giving a last-minute substitution. You’d be idly doing your huge amount of redundant, unnecessary paperwork and a secretary would come up to you and say, “Say, can you do a Level 5 private in Prague 4 in forty five minutes? It’s only thirty minutes away on the bus.” My roommate and I never answered our telephone during the day for fear of them.

Finally our first payday rolled around.

I’d spent about $500 my first month in Prague, but it’s normal to spend a lot the first month, before you knew the ins and outs of a place. I calmly waited in line for my money, wondering why some of the other new teachers were coming out looking so cross.

Than I found out..

The salary promised hadn’t been especially large, but the amount received turned out to be even lower, after taxes and other deductions. It ended up being about $200 a month, I think. I lost about $20 - $50 a month of my savings every month I lived in Prague.

I spent six months in Disneyland and then decided I couldn’t afford it anymore. My time in that most festive of cities was memorable, but colored by my poverty. Beer was cheap, but how was a guy supposed to keep up with the Italian tourists chasing cootchie when he couldn’t afford a decent new t-shirt every now and again?

There’s only one problem with living in Disneyland:

You can’t have too much fun if you don’t have any E tickets.

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