Great guessing Phil! You couldn’t have been more spot on. I’m from Gateshead, which is a town between Sunderland and Newcastle. I was born near London though and went to University in York, then moved to to Hat Yai, so I guess it’s been a bit jumbled along the way.

I really enjoy Hat Yai. I feel like it’s a bit of a hidden gem. It’s a busy city like you say, but not too big!

It’s very easy to get around and has everything you need (H&M, Imax and an Olympic sized swimming pool being some of my favourites!)

If you drive for around half an hour out of the city you will find countryside, waterfalls and beaches too.

There's definitely plenty of jobs around. I think most of them pay between 31-34,000 baht and offer 11-12 month contracts. One great thing about Hat Yai is the private tutoring pays very well here too - usually 400 baht plus per hour.

The teachers at my school are all really nice and a lot of them are trying to learn English, which is great. However, I’m still seen as the ‘farang’ teacher and never seem to know what’s going on until the very last minute!

I think they put too much pressure on the students at kindergarten level. They’re made to sit tests where they’re all sat at individual desks and if they’re seen trying to copy, they’re yelled at and dragged out of the classroom.

I have students in my classroom crying because they’re worried they wont get full marks on a test. I think they need to learn to let kids be kids more.

I’m quite lucky in the fact that my teaching hours are only 18 per week and I don’t have to be at school when I’m not teaching.

My partner is a freelance architect with an office at home so he looks after our son when I’m at school which is great. It's definitely tough but my little boy brightens my day so much!

My friend actually introduced us. She met him in a bar and was talking to him about music – she told me that we should go to a bar this guy recommends as it sounds like something I would enjoy (I don’t really go out much but I do enjoy a good band). A few weeks later we met him there and since then we became friends.

Yes definitely. I feel like if we worked in the UK we’d be working all hours in a day just to be able to pay bills.

In Thailand, we have a lot more free time and spare money to do the things like take our son to nice places and just enjoy our family life together.

We’d really love open our own little business here one day, maybe our own tutoring school at home.

It’s definitely something I’d like to do.

I have a few private students that I teach at home at the moment and really enjoy it as it gives me more freedom to teach the way I want. Hopefully if I have more students who want to study with me we can try and develop it into something more.

My agency was an absolute joke! It makes me angry just thinking about it. I think we received our work permits a month before teaching ended - after a lot of nagging. They were very disorganised.

Actually I was ‘fired’ from my school (two weeks before the end of term), I went home one evening and had a phone call that night from my agency telling me not to go back the next day! Talk about short notice.

They didn’t give me a real reason but I’ve heard rumours that it was because I'd had a little conflict with another teacher working at my school.

I chose Thailand because I’d met a lot of people who’d told me that Thai people were absolutely lovely and I thought that because it was my first time travelling,

I needed somewhere like that, as-well as somewhere that was safe. After reading a lot of blogs, the actually teaching side of things looked really fun too.

I definitely don’t think learning Thai is a poor investment of your time. How can learning anything new be a poor investment if it challenges you and makes you think or learn something?

Also, if nothing else, I feel like having knowledge of the Thai language makes you a better teacher because you can explain how English is different to Thai language.

I definitely enjoy being able to understand and speak some Thai and I think language helps you get a better understanding of the culture too. However, in another odd way I kind of enjoy not being able to understand 100% as it gets me out of having to be social sometimes!

Yes actually the last five-minute video I did took me two days to do! One day for planning and recording and another day editing.

There’s so many things to think about before you can film; what you’re going to say, where you’re going to film, the lighting, whether you yourself look okay or like a sweaty mess from a day of teaching in Thailand!

The editing part is very time consuming too. You definitely need a lot of patience, but it is all worth it in the end when you see what you’ve created.

Sort of yeah, when I was young I always made my friends little 'happy birthday' videos and things like that.

When I was at university I was involved with making lots of short films about university life for the marketing team, which I loved. I also I had a lot of friends from the film and television course and used to help them with making their films for fun :).

If you’d asked me 6 months ago I would have said no, but ever since I started my Youtube channel I have been hooked- I’ve realised it’s really nice being able to connect with people all over the world with similar interests.

I use Youtube, Twitter and Instagram a lot but I’ve not really expanded much over that, yet. You can follow me at /teachercola J (shameless self promotion).