Travels Without My Aunt

Published Categorised as Austria, Czech Republic, Germany, Liechtenstein, Travel No Comments on Travels Without My Aunt

I’ve spent most of the past month trav­el­ling around Germany and Austria teach­ing. It’s for an extra-curricular school programme. You do activ­it­ies to boost the children’s speak­ing confid­ence in English, work on creat­ive projects, and put on a show for the parents with present­a­tions of the projects, and drama writ­ten by the students. You don’t need to speak German to do the job, and you never speak German in the classroom, but of course it comes in useful to under­stand if the kids are being naughty, and in your time outside the classroom.

The company arrange your flight out, and book hotels for you in the towns you’ll be work­ing in, and give you a travel budget but it’s up to you to get your­self between the places in a timely manner (and to get to the right obscure town in Austria in the first place). This time all my assign­ments were roughly an 8 hour train ride from each other, so I’ve become very famil­i­ar with the differ­ent categor­ies of inter­city train in this part of the world. I finished work this week­end, and now I have a few days free in Nurem­berg before I fly back to the UK, and start anoth­er job hunt in earn­est. It worked out the same cost to fly back midweek and stay a few nights than it did to fly at the week­end. Silly, really. I am a little bit exhausted. This is the first day I haven’t either taught for 6 hours, or spent 4 hours + on a train.

My route:

Berlin: Company flew the teach­ers for Branden­burg and Saxony there. (Never ending) Train to Dresden.

Dresden: A week work­ing in a second­ary school in a suburb of the city. I saw as much as I could of the city, and visited a very inter­est­ing museum about daily life under the former commun­ist regime.

Prague: A day trip and overnight stay with anoth­er teach­er. We both had to go to Lower Austria on Sunday even­ing, and you could either go via Prague or Munich.

Kirch­berg-am-Wech­sel: A week in a juni­or school in a really tiny moun­tain town to the south of Wien­er Neustadt, right at the end of the Alps.

Salzburg: My next assign­ment was on the Austrian/​Liechtenstein/​Swiss border, so I had a long train jour­ney through the alps via Salzburg and Inns­bruck. I broke the jour­ney to stay overnight at Salzburg and do a litle sight­see­ing by myself.

Feldkirch: A week at a second­ary school. I went on a sight­see­ing trip to Liecht­en­stein, which is about 20 minutes away

Liecht­en­stein: I saw 66% of the museums, and all the major towns. There are few coun­tries where you can do that in one after­noon.

Nurem­berg: The cheapest place in the region that I could find a flight back to the UK from. Origin­ally the plan was that I was going to meet my friend Ellina this week­end, but we couldn’t find anywhere that would be a cheap flight for her from London on Fri/​Sat and a real­ist­ic train ride for me. Getting to Nurem­berg was still an all day affair that involved chan­ging at Inns­bruck and Munich. Moun­tains get in the way a lot. I return to the UK early on Thursday morn­ing.

I took a lot of photos, and have quite a bit to say about the places I visited, which will appear here in the next few days.

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