When I left the horse farm early I had a bit of a gap in my schedule after Japan and I decided to fill it doing an internship in France. This was something I had wanted to do before when I was there but had been unable to manage it. It is surprisingly hard to find a place to volunteer in France. You would think free labor would be gratefully accepted but with the help of my host family, I went to/called several food banks, charities etc and got a whole lot of "we will call you"s... they didn't. But this time I paid an organization to find me an internship where I could practice my french on a daily basis in a more professional setting. (yes I paid someone to find me somewhere I could work for free- ridiculous)
They made quick work of it and found me a hotel to work at as a receptionist. And the best part was of all the places in France it was ironically back in Montpellier, meaning I got to revisit my host family, crossfit Montpellier, and the Mediterranean climate all of which I had missed.
I arrived in from Japan at 10:00 pm on the Sunday and started work at 7:00 am on the monday. Clearly not jet lagged at all and firing on all cylinders, I arrived at the hotel and told the receptionist I was there to do an internship...she stared at me blankly. I guess no one had filled her in on the fact that she was going to have to babysit a barely french speaking newbie for the next couple weeks. But she gamely recovered and put me to work.
My first day the other receptionists left me at the front desk and went off for a "meeting" aka drink coffee, eat croissants and joke around for three hours while Dani has a mental breakdown. I managed to figure out how to do the check outs, thankfully they require minimal speaking... thank you , goodbye... that's it. But the phone never stopped ringing and the phone for me is an absolute NIGHTMARE. Even two weeks later I still groan every time it rings and try to avoid answering it at all costs.
I answer... "Danielle, Bonjour"
They respond, "Oui, Bonjour" nice and slowly.... andthentheycommencewithathousandwordcomplicatedandintricateexplanationofwhatthey needWithoutfailtheytalkaboutamillionmilesanhourandsomehowmanagetotalkfor6or7minutesstraight somehowwithoutsomuchaspausingforairandpickingupspeedastheygo.
They don't usually take kindly to being asked to repeat everything they just said. Thus, I have come up with socially acceptable ways to ask them to repeat (a.k.a complete lies) such as - oh the phone cut out, please start again.... or sorry it is noisy here, didn't quite catch that. Actually I lie quite a lot on the job because I also quite frequently tell them that our system is down and we will have to call them back to take their reservation when really I just don't know how to take a reservation yet.
Even if I somehow manage to understand what they want, rarely, I never know the answer which leads to a lot of exasperation... a lot. The french are not exactly known for their patience. Especially with foreigners butchering their language or just being useless in general. In person at the reception they are usually quite patient, they can see that I am trying/new and they usually are quite amicable. On the phone apparently nobodies got time for that shit.
One of my most "entertaining" phone call butcheries was on my second day was when the women wanted to know the exact composition of every single thing in the room,how big is the oven, how many forks/spoons/knives, what color are the drapes etc. And having never been inside the rooms I offered to have someone call her back with that information. I thought it was a fairly good response but she rudely came back with "do you not know because you don't speak french or because you just don't know anything about your own hotel" to which I took great pleasure in responding..... BOTH!.
Sometimes people try and be more sensitive about my ineptitude like the gentleman who hesitantly asked... "can I speak to someone else who speaks a bit... uhm... ahhh... better than you?" oh I wish we both had that option.
Of course to make my life just a little bit more difficult. The computers have a whole bunch of websites blocked... including Google Translate. NOOOOOOOoooooooo. One time I actually had to put the person on hold, go dig through my bag, find my cell phone, translate the word... all to figure out that his toilet was clogged. Nailed it.
While I have managed to pick up on some of the specific set of vocabulary surrounding the hotel it is still the little things that constantly trip me up. Like I am driven to irrational feats of rage by the annoyance of attempting to type with a french keyboard.
Even though I know it is not QWERTY my fingers automatically search for the keys in the same spot leading to words that look a lot like this...
Mqdqme .kle.nkà `guf^jj osfqë
Or there are other things that I guess you would take for granted as a native french person like knowing the ending to french email addresses .... blahblahblah@wanadoo.fr..... blahblahblah@orange.fr.... why can't we all just use a good old fashioned gmail or hotmail huh? Or types of cars that we don't have in Canada ... opels, megannes, citroens, Or types of addresses that we don't use. rue de vignes, clos, impasse etc.
As a result I have to get people to spell things... A lot. Which after a confused pause (because they have probably never been asked to spell something so simple before) they agree. Of course this is a whole different adventure in itself because I think purely to eff with my head the french alphabet has several letters that are the complete opposite of how we pronounce them in english... our E is their I and vice versa. Our G is their J and their J is something completely different. Oh and their E and U sound exactly the same if you ask me.
One kind soul thought he would be helpful and give me the old A as in Apple.. B as in Bob trick. But considering I had no clue how to spell the french words he used as examples, it wasn't really that helpful. G as in Gerard... or is it J as in Jerard? NO CLUE!!! I do slightly better with understanding numbers but then again I tried to take a credit card number the other day over the phone and had to sheepishly call back 10 minutes later because somewhere in the 15 digit card number I had gotten tripped up.
There are some perks to working at the hotel though.There is an endless supply of free croissants, chocolate croissants, other assorted pastries and all the tea/coffee/hot chocolate/juice you can drink. So I will be about double the size when I leave here since I drown my sorrows and stress in chocolate croissants with added nutella on top.
Plus there is rarely a dull day at the office. Case and point yesterday the police strolled in and arrested someone staying in the hotel. They turned the whole room into a crime scene. The person in question casually strolled back in later that night and demanded the key to his room. Ummm??? just going to call the police first to see if we can take down the crime scene tape.
A couple days before that there was also a whole bunch of staff drama that resulted in the head of reception crying all afternoon. I am tentatively tip toeing around a whole lot of staff politics that are really confusing to a non french speaking outsider. I am also fairly convinced that one of the receptionists is together with the director of the hotel. She appears to be married though and I don't know if it is to him (rings/ no rings). Never fear Detective Dani is on the case. I will include my findings in my next post.
I have two more weeks to go at the hotel... pray for me!
