Has anyone got any advice for me please, I want to do a tefl course and then teach abroad and would appreciate some words of wisdom from someone who's done similar. Cheers.

I did a TEFL course a few years ago, and was looking around for the cheapest, most interesting place to do it. Back then, Cairo was the cheapest place in the world to do a TEFL qualification; dunno if it still is. I signed up, was accepted, and had an excellent month of training at the International Language Institute (ILI) in the Sahafayeen district of Cairo. Passed my TEFL, then immediately got a job in the same school as a teacher (but then had to return to the UK for medical reasons, and never took up the job). Moved on after that to other things, and never went back into teaching; oh well.

After my £200 fee (or whatever; bit more than that I think) and my month of hard study, I was actually on my own in a classroom for about an hour and three quarters, and as far as I can remember most of that was spent with the kids chucking a tennis ball around saying their name (catch the ball, say your name, then say the name of the person you're throwing to -- kind of a beginning-of-term ice-breaker). Aside from that, the teacher-training course was excellent, very rigorous, very engaging, and, if you get good instructors (which I think they probably all are, or they wouldn't get the job), then it's an absolutely brilliant, mind- and skills-expanding experience. Bloody hard work too.

That's about the limit of my TEFL tale; there must be people out there with better stories than me, and more concrete advice too...