Toby Neal: English Trainer

I've had a lot of good leads since finishing my CELTA certification. I've applied to about 30 language institutes in Vienna and got called in for 5 interviews, all of which want to offer me courses to teach. That's definitely good news, but now I need to worry (a little bit) about over-committing myself. Because I'll be working as a freelance trainer for several schools simultaneously, I'll need to keep a close track of my own schedule and make sure classes never overlap. It's a better problem to have than not having any work though, so I'm very pleased about that.

My first official paid lesson will happen on Monday for Berlitz, an institute which Americans might be familiar with from their foreign language phrasebooks. Unlike the other language schools, Berlitz had their own training course which was 8 hours a day for 6 days. A lot of it was similar to what I learned during the CELTA course except for Berlitz doesn't teach grammar directly in that they don't want trainers to explain grammar rules in black and white. Rather we're supposed to subtly slip it into conversation, which is actually difficult for me because I've been studying English grammar a lot since I decided to try my hand at teaching. I want to show off what I've been learning!

The Berlitz training was also a good time to meet some other native English speakers living in Vienna. It was super easy to make friends in Budapest because I was always with Americans and Englanders and the same goes with the Berlitz training. Looking back on my time in Budapest, I was hesitant to go there, but I met some great people. They were so great that Marlene and I ended up spending my birthday weekend there celebrating with them. We did some touristy things during the day and met up with them in the evenings. The highlight of the trip for me was going to the karaoke bar where we sang a few duets without much response until we did "Got My Mind Set on You" by George Harrison and the place went crazy! Since then I've had the song stuck in my head and have played it dozens of times on youtube.

Another super great piece of news in the last few weeks is that we've officially planed a trip back to the USA for summer. We'll be back in Minnesota (and who knows where else...) between July 10 and August 5. The awesome thing about being a freelance worker is that I can take holidays for basically however long and whenever I want. Marlene has all of July and August free so we could potentially have the opportunity to spend a month or more every summer in the USA which I would love!

First post in a month!

So again I've gone quite a while without posting but it's definitely not because of a lack of subjects to blog about. Earlier in the month, my grandpa unfortunately died so I made a quick trip back to the USA in order to attend his funeral. It was a sad time but it was actually really nice to see my family and friends who I haven't seen since the summer. During that time, I did some thinking about job and decided it wasn't something that I'd like to continue long-term since, even though my job title was "IT-Administrator", my boss had me doing more secretary work. When I came back, my boss had been thinking a similar thing so I stopped working there last week. I'm not really sure if I was technically fired, since I didn't want to stay on. I suppose it doesn't matter too much except for I liked keeping the record in my mind that I'd never been fired from a job, kind of like how I've never had a cavity (sorry for the dental hygiene bragging!).

My last day was on Jan 27 and I've already had an interview yesterday, Jan 31, which went awesome. They said they'd be contacting me back this week and I could be starting as early as next week. I also have another interview tomorrow where I think I've got a great chance at getting a job offer so I feel like I'm in a good position which was not the case a few months ago when I felt like I hit the lottery by getting a job offer.


Here's a pic for everyone in Austria. This is from my week in Minnesota so you can see how much snow they have there, it's well above my head (in a parking lot). In Vienna we get snow every once in a while but it always melts pretty quick. So far, I have not been missing the Minnesota winter. It's fun to brag about living through it in the past but I'm glad to not be in the middle of it now, my soccer team will be starting outdoor practice in a couple weeks, that's definitely an example of something that would never be happening in Minnesota at this time of year.

Returning from my visit to the USA I brought back my Xbox and several games so you'd expect by now I'd be a gamer again but it's a little tougher than that. First, we tried plugging in the Xbox power supply using a cheap travel converter (which works for laptops, cell phone chargers and other electronics) but that just caused our apartment's power to go out. We did a bit of research and found that a step-down converter was required so we ordered one and when it arrived had a little bit more luck. We plugged it in and it looked like it would work except when we plugged the Xbox power supply into the converter, nothing happened... So we returned the step-down converter and instead ordered a European Xbox power supply which had the same output voltage as my American Xbox power supply but it arrived today and when we tried plugging the European power supply into the wall, it caused the power to go out again! So we don't really know what the problem could be, it looks to me now that there might be something strange with the electricity in our apartment, but of course now when we try plugging in the European power supply nothing happens, so that means a fuse blew out in the power supply itself. It's all very frustrating and I just to want to play Oblivion again while Marlene is dying to play The Sims 3.

Frohe Weihnachten!

It's been a while since I've posted so I'll try to catch you all up on what's been happening lately.

My job has been going well. It seems like it's more administrative assistant work rather than IT administration, and it's a struggle every day to speak German, but I've just got to keep on pushing through.

I celebrated Christmas here, which was actually the second time I've done so, so it wasn't entirely strange to spend the holiday away from my American family. We definitely saw enough Austrian family to make up it. We spent Christmas Eve in Vienna, just Marlene and I. We cooked ourselves a delicious dinner on our raclette grill, then we sang some English/German songs, then opened presents. I got a nice watch to replace the one that broke when it fell out of my pocket at a soccer practice during the Fall and the watch face broke. I also got Football Manager 2011 which is a super addictive soccer club managing game. I'm currently still playing the 2010 version of the game because I've got a season with Austria Wien that I can't quit yet.

On Christmas day we traveled to Neusiedl am See and had a great dinner with Marlene's immediately family. After the dinner we played board games all night. The next day we went to an Aunt's house and had dinner with all of her family who lives in Neusiedl. We again played board games afterward, mostly an extremely long game of the Settlers of Catan, which was won by Marlene's cousin Wolfgang. Then on Monday I had to work again so we came back to Vienna, and the Christmas season officially ended.

Now, we're looking forward to the New Year! We're going to spend it at a friend of a friend's place and hopefully play some more Settlers of Catan. If I don't win then it'll definitely be a bad omen going into the new year...

1 Week Into My New Job

Exactly one week ago I had a job interview in the morning at cSt Causa, a small tax accountancy firm, as an IT Administrator. At the end of a relatively short interview, the boss offered me a job on the spot and asked me to come back that afternoon to start following around the current IT guy. So today I'm celebrating both the one week anniversary of my successful interview and my one week anniversary on the job!

The IT administrating portion of the job is only part-time so that's all I'm working at the moment, but I'll have the opportunity to make the position full-time if I take on more responsibilities like administrative assistance, marketing, helping tutor English, and helping translate documents/their website into English. Hopefully, I'll be able to take on these additional challenges, but as of right now I'm still learning my way around and getting to know my colleagues. The office is in Vienna's inner city and the dress code is more formal than anywhere else I've worked so it's fun because both of these make me feel important somehow. It's hard to say if dressing up every day might get old after a while though. We'll see!

Thanksgiving

Tomorrow is Thanksgiving in the USA but obviously that means nothing in Austria so there will be no turkey dinner with family. I could eat a turkey sandwich perhaps, but I just bought some chicken today so I think I'd rather make a schnitzel. I'd like to wish all my family and friends back in the US a happy Thanksgiving though, please eat a dark turkey leg for me.

I've heard Minnesota is completely snowed in which is unimaginable here. We're still having nice weather with temperatures in 40's and 50's. Sometimes there's rain, but not a hint of snow. In the Alps though, there's already plenty of snow and skiing season has begun, here in Vienna the only hint of winter is that an outdoor skating rink downtown has opened. Tom and Pete know the area well, in the summer they visited the place when it was a sand volleyball bar.

Of course Thanksgiving in the US is always the last significant event before Christmas season starts. My dad has already reminded me that this year I'll need to write a Christmas card and send it out to people since Marlene and I are technically a new family now. If anyone is wondering what we(I) might want as a gift, my old Xbox along with Rock Band 2, a guitar, and a microphone might be a good idea... I've really been missing playing video games even though I'm fully aware it would negatively affect my job search.

As far as my job search goes, I did get a piece of good news this week. I got an offer for a temp job opening as an IT support guy where the customers are mainly English-speaking, based in the UK, but it's quite a bit outside of Vienna in a town called Wolfsgraben. It would take an hour to get there with trains/buses but I told the guy I'd like to come for an interview. I'm still waiting to hear back from him. Apart from job searching I'm also looking at going back to school which makes me regret ever being educated in the US on account of the cost of universities here. Some are close to American prices like 20,000 Euros for an entire Master's program but many are only a few hundred Euros per semester, while some are free!! I'd have to pass entrance exams and be accepted but it seems crazy that Americans would pay so much for an education when it's so affordable here. Ethan, if you're reading this, please look into going to university in Spain. I'm sure you'd love it and I bet you have enough money saved up already to fly here and pay for the first couple semesters.

Long Time No Blog

I haven't written a post for a week now but it definitely hasn't been due to a lack of things to write, more so the opposite. Last Tuesday I got a call somewhat out of the blue asking if I could do a telephone interview for the next day. It was from the company Accenture where Marlene's uncle (the one who owns our apartment actually) used to work. I had given him my résumé and he'd said he'd pass it on to a former colleague there. I did the phone interview and I thought it went pretty well. The next day they asked for my transcript and a letter of recommendation so I sent my transcript which I had handy and emailed my old boss to get a letter of recommendation. Then on Monday, I was invited to an all-day recruiting event that would take place the next day (yesterday).

On Tuesday, there were about 15 applicants, and we met at the Accenture office in downtown Wien. We took a bus to the airport where we would be spending the whole day. We were given breakfast and an intro speech by a couple higher-ups for the Germany/Austria/Switzerland region. One of the guys was actually from Switzerland so he was extremely difficult to understand in German. Then we were separated into smaller groups to do a case study. We were given a situation that we had to talk through, formulate a plan of action, then give a presentation on our results. That was definitely the most difficult part of the day, so in hindsight I'm glad it happened first. After that we were given lunch and took turns going in for individual face to face interviews. The questions asked of me weren't too difficult but I was too nervous to put together detailed, grammatically correct sentences so I was quite disappointed with my performance.

The rest of the afternoon was just meant to be fun. We got a tour of behind the scenes at the airport so we saw the plane garages where aircraft were being repaired and were almost completely disassembled. We also got to practice flying in true flight simulator used for training actual pilots. That will probably go down as one of the most unique experiences I've had in my life. We had an hour long training beforehand and then we got to try it ourselves where we were able to taxi down the runway, then takeoff and fly around a bit. Then they loaded a landing program and we tried that, but landing was a lot more difficult. We were in the simulator the whole time while the others were flying and could see the same as the pilot so it was pretty scary when one of my group members had a bad landing and the whole cabin shook and the screen was tinted red, indicating we had all died.

After the fun stuff we were taken back to the big meeting room and taken one by one to see who would be receiving job offers. I wasn't one of the lucky ones, so then I had to sit around and wait a while longer for everyone to finish so we could take the bus back to Wien. I wasn't at all surprised to not get a job offer but it was depressing nonetheless. But I'll have to try and put a positive spin on it by thinking about how it was good experience for future interviews, as well as getting to use the flight simulator and getting some Accenture swag.