A Small Update From Thomas

If you have been reading Thomas’ blog then you may have noticed the last two weeks have been a little quiet. Thomas Brock, our resident travelling English teacher has taken a couple of weeks off from his writing schedule but is now back! Read, learn some new vocabulary, and practise English!

Vocabulary List

Routine : a usual or fixed way of doing things.

Classics: the study of ancient Greek and Roman culture, esp. their languages and literature.

Work culture: the attitudes and behaviors of employees within an organisation or industry.

Temporary : not lasting or needed for very long.

Financial : relating to money or how money is managed.

Compromise : a solution to a problem that makes it possible for two or more opposite or different things to exist together.

Mortgage : an agreement that allows you to borrow money from a bank or similar organisation, especially in order to buy a house.

A short note on my whereabouts

If you have been reading my blog posts each week since I started, then you may have noticed that there hasn’t been a post for the last two weeks. That is because I was skiing for one week, and then I was quite ill the following week. I am now, however, back into my routine of working, teaching that is, and travelling. I obviously have some things that I can write about, especially my week skiing, but I wanted to write this week about something a little different.

A number of my posts have been about different places that I have visited, what I think of them, and what I did there, but I was asked recently about why I am travelling, and that is something I wanted to write a few words on.

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I am a teacher. I used to teach in schools in the UK. I taught Classics, and I did really enjoy it, or at least most of it. After working in a number of schools I decided it was no longer for me. I don’t want to go into too much detail, perhaps at another point, but I really wanted to leave the work culture in a lot of UK schools behind. The other thing that bothered me was a desire to travel. Sure, you get a lot of time off as a teacher, but school holidays make for expensive travel.

When I decided to leave teaching, I wasn’t exactly sure what to do, and teaching English online was actually something that I began to do as a temporary source of income whilst I thought about what I really wanted to do. However, as I took on more students I began to find a greater interest in the world of 1to1 online English tutoring, and here I am, over three years later.

Whilst it certainly hasn’t been easy and the global pandemic made travelling completely impossible until relatively recently, I am now doing what I wanted to do, working for myself, and travelling. As I write this now, I am in Sarajevo.

I will make a longer post about Sarajevo – I really like it here. As for this week’s post, I just wanted to update my current situation as someone who works remotely and has no real base or single location where I live. 

I am from the UK, but I did not spend my entire childhood there. My parents live in two separate parts of the country, I have friends in different cities, and have made new ones abroad. I don’t have a great desire to be in the UK, and I’m not sure which part of the country I would really see myself living. The other thing is that it really doesn’t make financial sense to live in the UK when I don’t have a job that is located there.

I like being in different places, month to month, it suits me.

Building a routine can sometimes be a challenge when I’m moving around. Travel plans sometimes dictate my schedule, and getting from A to B can be expensive or complicated sometimes. Moving from city to city can make habits and routines feel more difficult to form, but I think these are small compromises for me; I have always found routine difficult and so travelling doesn’t really make a difference to me.

So here I am in Sarajevo, enjoying sunsets, and working as if nothing is different at all. Such is the benefit of remote working.

Is it easy? Not really. Is it what I want to do? Yes. Is my life perfect? Far from it.

I still live by most of the same limitations that most people live by, I just am not invested geographically. I don’t have a mortgage or long-term rent contract or a physical job to turn up for. That doesn’t mean I can go anywhere. I am still limited by what I can afford and where is sensible to go.

I can’t afford expensive cities or expensive flights every month, but I am lucky that I have found a good number of locations that are very nice and cheaper than the UK. For the time being, I will stick to these locations, but in the future, I hope to remove this limitation, and open up the rest of the world to myself to visit, and work from. 

As for now, I offer a warm greeting from Sarajevo.

Does your job allow you to travel?

Have you ever thought about working fully remotely?

If you could work anywhere in the world, would you stay where you are, move somewhere new, or move around?

Do you have recommendations for places I should visit next?