MARKO GANZA

The Traveler

“I’m just one drop in the sea of educators overseas who’ve managed to take advantage of a job abroad.  Tons of people live abroad and travel lots” maintains Marko Ganza; still, as modest as he is, he has certainly done well for himself in this regard, especially since he started

teaching abroad.

As a Bosnian-born Canadian citizen of Croatian ethnicity teaching/assessing English in China, Marko has obviously traveled, but it was at the age of 26, in Sept. 2002, that travel took on a whole new meaning for him.  It was then that he accepted his 1st overseas teaching assignment and he’s been taking advantage of a job abroad ever since – e.g., he has developed a successful teaching career, paid-off his student loans, saved thousands and, quite noteworthy, he has visited 25% of Earth’s countries in that time.  His life changed in many ways with the benefits of a job abroad, but it’s the life with travel that gives him a special satisfaction.

His 1st teaching job abroad was in Abu Dhabi city, capital of the United Arab Emirates.  One of his motives in accepting the job was that it would permit the realization of one of his childhood dreams: to see the Great Pyramids of Egypt.  He moved to the Emirates that Sept. and a few months later, during a break between semesters, he found himself in the Giza plateau

admiring the Pyramids in person.  It was the fulfillment of a dream and

the beginning of a personal golden age.

Based out of the Emirates for nearly 5 years and funded by teaching English to Emirati children, he took advantage of summer, winter and other holidays to travel; there was the Egypt trip; journeys to Morocco, Oman and a 2 country holiday in Cambodia-Thailand; parts of summers spent in Bosnia and Hercegovina, Canada, China, Croatia, England, Hungary, Italy, Norway and the U.S.A.; noteworthy are a surprise trip home to his family and, in the summer of 2006, a 65-day solo old-world tour from Amman, Jordan, to Athens, Greece, by land, zigzagging through several countries and while receiving summer pay; moreover, when he left the UAE in 2007, he took the long way home that included a few Gulf state visits, a week in the Maldives and 3 months in

Sri Lanka and India.

Then, in Aug. 2008 he crossed the bridge to a life living in South Korea.  Based from Daegu for the next year, he took advantage of an easy schedule in several ways, including making time to explore parts of South Korea. 

A year later, in Aug. 2009, he went straight from one week working in Daegu, South Korea, to the next week working in Taiyuan, Shanxi, China.  Two and a half years after that he took the bridge to Dalian, Liaoning province, where he lived for half a year; from there it was off to Changsha in Hunan province for yet another half-year before a year in Xi’an, capital of Shaanxi province.  A little later, a semester in Wenzhou, Zhejiang, China, and since Dec. 2014 he's been doing English language assessment consulting in Shanghai.

Six lives in six provinces in 6 years of experience in China and growing, Marko has exploited the situation to explore a multitude of places in this continent-of-a-country.  He’s been to dozens of provinces/territories in China and, outside of China, international forays include a multi-country trip from Kuala Lumpur to Bali and back; 1 month in Vietnam to professionally develop and another to travel it and neighboring Laos; some weeks exploring the Philippines; a short tour of North Korea and, in late 2013, a land journey from Beijing to Croatia – via the Beijing to Moscow Trans-Siberian railway – which equated a  few weeks of exploring several countries and territories in Eastern Europe, including Chernobyl and Transnistria.

In short, since 2002 Marko has visited dozens of countries and territories via teaching abroad, and now Marko works in English language assessment consulting.  When asked what the key to successfully traveling so much is, he replies, “There's a lot to it, but I haven't finished writing

that book yet."