About Me — Alice Sullivan
Ideally a traveler, realistically a teacher, and optimistically a writer.
Hi! I’m Alice. I’m 24 years old and I am a British girl working as a teacher in Prague, Czech Republic. It’s been a wild few years, so how did I get here?
I’m from Aylesbury in the UK, but I haven’t lived there since 2018. I’m not the biggest fan of my hometown. When I miss things about the UK, it’s mostly Greggs vegan steak bakes and sausage rolls. However, I do have some amazing memories there. Mostly, going to London with friends. I think about going to Pride in London. Hiding alcohol inside fake sunscreen bottles when we went to the Summertime festival in Hyde Park.
A lot of the fun times in the UK were with my best friend, but we also wanted to go somewhere different. After two weeks in Florida with her family and a year of working full-time, we started planning a huge trip for the summer of 2016: Japan and South Korea.
This wasn’t just because we liked anime and k-pop. We wanted to go somewhere far away for a proper adventure. We made a lot of mistakes during this trip. Mainly, we spent a lot of money and spent too much time together (leading to us barely speaking for the first few days in Seoul). No major arguments, but if you spend 24/7 with anyone for two weeks, they are going to get on your nerves.
Luckily, our friendship survived that month (although we didn’t travel together again for a while). I went back to South Korea alone in the summer of 2017 with a plan. I wanted to see if I liked it enough to move there. I wanted to teach English abroad when I finished my degree. Spoiler alert: I didn’t actually finish my degree.
I actually had a total mental breakdown in 2018. I quit my job, dropped out of university, and got diagnosed with depression. Quitting everything was one of the best decisions I ever made. I’m not saying that travel will fix anything, but a one-way flight became how I dealt with my problems.
I took a massive leap of faith in October 2018 and I moved to Prague. Why? I have no idea. I hadn’t decided on a location. I just started applying for hostel jobs all over Europe. I still cannot remember why I picked the Czech Republic, but I just booked that flight and came here. I didn’t even tell my family until I was at my Dad’s wedding and leaving in three days.
Prague was wild. I worked in a hostel, on the pub crawl, and was even a tour guide for absinth bars. The complete opposite of my other work experience. Although, there are some parallels between caring for toddlers and caring for drunk adults. I loved it! Even if handing out shots, yelling at drunk strangers, and getting wasted on the job isn’t the most respected profession.
A lot of people ask me how I could afford to just quit everything and take really low-paid jobs. Honestly, I had money in my savings after Nan passed away. The last time I saw her was shortly after my solo Korea trip and she was so happy to see all my photos. She told me how brave she thought I was for traveling alone and how she wanted me to continue to live my life doing amazing things like this. So, that’s what I did with her money.
I am not the most sensible person, but I was very careful not to dip into those savings when I moved to Prague. I was living in a hostel, working a lot, and just living a fairly normal life. However, I did quit my job and go to Paris for New Years' Eve. Then, I spontaneously booked a trip to India and Sri Lanka for January 2019.
I returned to Prague in February and I was itching to get back to Asia again, but I was waiting for my best friend to be ready. That’s when I started working in the Sex Machines Museum. If you ignore the long hours and gross men, it was worth it and it’s definitely one of the most interesting jobs I ever had.
I took a very long bus across Europe to come home. I promised my best friend that I would be back for the midnight screening of Avengers: Endgame, but the flights were ridiculously expensive at Easter. My solution was a 13-hour bus to Brussels. I had 24 hours in the city to drink beer and eat Belgian waffles, before another bus and a train to eventually get me to her house. It definitely made the journey a lot more exciting.
In May 2019, it was time for another one-way flight. The plan was always to head to Asia together in the summer- after learning from our mistakes on our previous trips. This time, we headed to Kuala Lumpur. Our trip had so many amazing moments and I could talk about it for hours, but our first week in South East Asia was actually hilarious. If you want to read about my best friend falling in the sea in Malaysia, check it out here:
I was in South East Asia for 10 months. My best friend traveled to Malaysia, Singapore, and Indonesia with me. Two months is a long time to spend with one person, so we went separately to avoid another Seoul situation. She went to see Komodo Dragons in Flores and I worked in a party hostel in Uluwatu. She volunteered with animals somewhere in the middle of Thailand and I worked in a hostel in Koh Phangan for the Full Moon period. That does show the differences in our personalities quite well.
Our epic reunion was in a party hostel in Bangkok. It was a mess. I fell down a flight of stairs, she let a drunk man on the pub crawl cut one of her pigtails off, I got two phones stolen within a month and she was hanging out the side of tuk-tuks screaming. We traveled some of Thailand together before she had a crisis about having no plan and decided to apply for her working holiday visa for New Zealand.
I had no problem with traveling alone in Asia. I did Thailand alone in the summer of 2018. However, my best friend acts as the sensible one. She is my conscience and my voice of reason. I do everything spontaneously and multiple times I had drunk conversations that led to me accepting jobs in hostels for a month at a time. Of course, I was trying to conserve my money so it was a decent strategy.
I spent a month in Phnom Penh working in a very chilled out hostel. I decided to start being vegan and I enjoyed showing tourists around the city. I did consider moving back there for teaching, but I fell in love with Vietnam instead.
Vietnam has my heart. I was there for three months. For the first six weeks, I worked in a party hostel in Ho Chi Minh. I never would have expected to spend my Christmas on a rooftop in Vietnam while a shirtless man in the bottom half of a Santa costume is barbecuing the contents of a Christmas dinner. I love the unpredictable travel life.
My next job was days after I left Ho Chi Minh and was in a beautiful hostel with a mountain view of Dalat. Once again, there’s too much to say about this place and I could ramble on forever about it.
Minus the motorbike accident, Dalat was the best. I had an amazing group of friends with who I traveled to my next destination. Hoi An was mainly drinking and good vibes, but we got serious in Danang. Staying in an apartment together and helping each other edit CVs to apply for long-term teaching jobs. We even looked at houses.
However, when I was in Thailand, Vietnam closed its borders due to a COVID outbreak. I had to leave the country for visa reasons, but it was the worst timing. That’s the only reason that I’m not still in Danang now and working as a teacher there.
I made the most of it and had my last great adventure around Thailand until the end of March 2020. I was running out of money, but struggling to find work. The schools were closing. The tourists were going home. I had to make a decision. I ended up having to fly home to the UK. After backpacking for 314 days, I was heartbroken to be coming back.
So that brings us to now! I moved back to Prague in August 2020. I have been working as a teacher since schools returned in September. I don’t always love teaching, but it’s something I am confident in and the easiest way to get a job as an English speaker. My experience working in schools gives me an advantage that makes up for my lack of a degree.
I am also gaining confidence in my writing this year. I have been reminiscing on travels and writing about my stories for my own sanity. I’ve always loved writing, but sharing my work has always been anxiety-inducing. Now that I am growing in confidence, I am hoping to expand my work into new topics and keep improving as I write on Medium. For now, it’s reassuring for me to write, to help me remember the good times, and remind myself that I will go back to Asia to make more memories soon.
All photos are credited to the author.
