“I eated …” A small grimace from me prompted Kurt to check the verb table in his textbook. “I ate pizza.” He gave a short laugh and assumed that frustrated expression of someone who wants to say more but doesn’t know how.

I broke my English-only rule and asked him about the pizza in German.

“Every day for six days I ate the same meal,” he confessed. “Pizza is the only thing I understood on the menu. I don’t even really like pizza!”

"Finding teaching positions in Eastern Europe is still reasonably easy for native English speakers of all nationalities, though nearly all these positions require a TEFL qualification or some previous experience."

I made a mental note to urgently bring our restaurant vocabulary lesson forward, and returned to interviewing Kurt about his trip.

When I left Australia four years ago, I would never have said I’d end up teaching Business English, but one day in Japan I came home to our tiny tatami-mat-covered flat to an announcement from my boyfriend, who’d spent the day in a smoky Internet café researching our next step: “If we want to live in Europe, we’ll have to teach Business English.”

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