D.P. T-Shot Reference Blog

Back in 1998 I was living in Madrid teaching English as a foreign language. I had been there a couple of years and enjoyed it but had itchy feet and wanted to go further overseas. On the wall in the flat there was a big world map and each day I would look at it thinking about where to go. I had leant just about enough Spanish over the previous two years to get by so a Spanish speaking country overseas was the obvious choice. There are plenty of stories about how dangerous it can be abroad there or how poor certain areas are but there seemed many more positives than negatives.

Costa Rica stood out from other places as it was the most developed and westernized in the central American region. Almost everything I heard about it sounded great. What’s more is there were apparently plenty of teaching ESL jobs in the country so finding work should be too difficult. We both were quite experienced teaching English abroad so felt we had an advantage over new arrivals. My girlfriend and I bought a couple of guide books and started reading up.

When we arrived in August 1998 it was in the middle of the monsoon season. It rained incessantly every afternoon which made job hunting tricky. To find teaching English overseas jobs we would regularly get the Tico Times which is an English language newspaper. This has a good classified section with about a dozen language schools advertising ESL posts. In the end we started working for 2 schools and divided our time between them.