How time flies.

This weekend, the attention of Melbourne was well and truly on the start of the F1 Season down at Albert Park. However, for me, it was to be fully focused on my own start in the world of EFL Teaching.

I had begun the accompanying Online Modules a few weeks back, wedging in what library time I could muster up from my ever-increasingly busy day. I had found most of it relatively comfortable so far; although that is not to say that it doesn't get the old grey cells' twirling in fits every now and then. Far from it. What is dramatically obvious from the outset is that - as masters of our native tongue - we really don't hold that great an understanding of how we do it at all. It just.. happens. Just what are the four classes of the determiner? What is the most common sound in the English Language?

Article, Quantifiers, Possessive, & Demonstrative and the 'schwa' if you're interested.

Apart from resuscitating my studious side from its slumbering state though, it hadn't been too much and I'd made good progress. It had also served as a great taster for what I would be covering over the weekend. Having spent Friday evening in a caucophony of laughter & ale, waving 'Bon Voyage!' to a great Seychelles-bound friend of mine, the following morning was the first day of my TEFL Course.

What was great to notice from the start was that we were going to be taught how to teach English in the same way we would be teaching our students English. With fourteen of us, the class was intimate enough to feel a real part of it and big enough to have plenty of options for activities and interaction. I was surrounded by a wonderfully stereotypical diverse range of folk - from nurses to fire twirlers, post-uni grads to those reinventing themselves one more time. Every single one of us carried the same ambition though and it was great to hear the plans and ideas of others riding in the same boat with me.

Our tutor, Brett, was an incredibly calm man - articulate, approachable, inventive, and well-travelled. A professor of his profession, may I suggest. Throughout the day we covered various teaching techniques, methods, activities, & issues - all within the same lesson structure that is so vehemently implored throughout for us to apply ourselves. By the end of the day, I had sucked in and spat out enough to teach my very first ever EFL lesson: a vocab lesson in travel items to an elementary level of student. It was five minutes long, taught four words, and involved a tiny bit of fret and bundles of fun. It was brilliant. I bound home terribly excited and literally spent the whole evening researching everything from Hanoian apartments in Ho Tay to the modal auxiliary verb. Eventually the failings of a weary English pace attack took its toll and I was forced to bed. Tomorrow was Day Two.

Day Two began around 17 minutes before its lesson was due to commence, namely due to a dodgy alarm clock. Setting a faster lap than any of the multi-millionaire sportsmen that were in town for the weekend, I raced out my apartment and in to a taxi fortunately seemingly-manned by Karun Chandhok. You might want to Google that. Despite the lack of caffeine-based fuel on board, I managed to make it on time. OK, enough of the racing analogies.

Today's lesson began in very much the same vein as yesterday, albeit with a far more relaxed atmosphere in the air. Brett effortlessly picked up from where we had left off and before we knew it, we were in full swing. Things seemed a little more thought-provoking and adventurous today. One thing that really sunk in today was the abundance of approaches available to any teacher who's willing to become adventurous and inventive with how they teach. Sounds pretty good to me. Once again, we were given the opportunity to teach a small vocab/dialogue lesson with our partners and encouraged to let our hair down a little this time. What I personally felt followed was increasingly structured plans, more relaxed teaching, increasingly inventive activities and a stronger sense of what it is to be an EFL teacher.

I had read good things in online reviews before but there's nothing like seeing for yourself, and having now spent the evening taking the whole weekend in, I am incredibly glad I did. I am already envisaging a future that could really last a lifetime if I wanted it to. Not bad for two day's work.

It has now been a month since I booked my TEFL Course, and subsequently reaffirmed that myself and Chloe would definitely be heading to Vietnam in order to work and live for 6 months.

The days seem to have vanished before my eyes since then, and a whole stack of ticks have been made against the checklist. I successfully moved on to my FOURTH Australian Visa (and last one, for a while at least..) which has given me that extra bout of time to get everything in order. It has also paved the way for the real beginnings of this adventure. The same day, our flights were booked through Jetstar (with a saving of $360 from the sale!) and by the end of the week our Viet visa applications had also been lodged.

From here on in, there'll be no respite. A trip to the doctors for a few jabs is around the corner, not to mention the replacement of everything that was stolen from my bag last week. b****** thieves now walk around with the greatest music collection mankind has ever had the joy of beholding.

It's all certainly putting pay to the old adage 'one step at a time..' though. Try ten leaps.