I spent the last year in full time graduate school while completing a year-long student teaching internship. This brutal schedule awarded me a post-grad teaching certification in Secondary Education, which in turn allowed me to secure a job at an international school in Tirana, the capital of Albania.
Full disclosure: When I first stumbled upon the job posting on Dave’s ESL Cafe, I only had a vague notion of where, exactly, Albania was in the world. And I have a huge map of the world on my wall that I look at on the daily. And I knew where Greece, Italy, and Turkey are located, which all happen to be gathered in a rough circle around Albania. Needless to say, I researched where Albania was in the world, applied for the job, and in March of 2012, two months before completing my internship, I was officially on my way to Albania this August.
Right now I’m sitting in my apartment, procrastinating the huge task of culling all of my belongings and giving about 99% of them to Goodwill, and distracting myself from being overwhelmed by starting this blog. In so doing, I’m abandoning the blog I kept from 2008 until now. When I was researching Albania in general and Tirana specifically, I found that there was, relatively speaking in terms of the ever expanding universe of the internet, very little to be found in terms of personal accounts of living and working there. Hopefully this blog and my navel gazing ramblings about my life will help others who are looking for information on a personal level.
We’ll talk more later, but for now, the guilt is pressing heavily on me and it’s back to the grind of moving prep.
Originally published July 28th, 2012 on Blogger
