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[douglas1969]

[simon44]

I've just completed about a year of teaching at an English Program school in Yangon. This is not an international school by name, but the standard of the teaching was probably on a par with the international schools...

Although I enjoyed teaching at the school and was offered a new contract, I opted to return to my home in Thailand for family reasons. upon receiving this news, one of the school directors sneakily withheld almost 50% of my salary for my final month of work. Unable to persuade him to change his mind, I resigned immediately.

What a pity my happy times at this school were spoilt by a greedy director.

In general terms, living in Yangon is hard-going. I work on single-status, and living in Laos and Cambodia were a breeze compared to Yangon.

A few of the main problems:

- Myanmar food is greasy and oily, and seems to consist mainly of the parts of animals that are usually used for reproductive purposes. I stuck to eating Chinese noodles.

- The general sanitation and hygiene is very poor, (not a surprise). But it means that you need to be really careful about the food you eat. I got food poisoning many times.

- There are no decent hospitals in the country. You need to make a trip to Bangkok if you are ill.

- There is insufficient electricity to supply all, so the government often switches it to supply the tourist hotels - locals are left in the dark - literally.

- Internet speed is appalling. The only time that I could download 3-minute teaching videos/alphabet songs from YouTube was before 7am each morning.

- Apartment rental prices have gone through the roof, so you may be forced to accept a slum if your budget will not stretch higher. Rats and cockroaches and open sewers will be all around you (My apartment living room had buckets to catch the rain water)

Having said all that, if you are a frontier teacher, then Yangon is an interesting experience. If my personal circumstances were different, I would go back again to teach, but aware that employment contracts are not worth the paper that they are written on.