I often think that the night is more alive and more richly colored than the day. (Vincent Van Gogh)

I was reading blogs about people wroking as night auditor in the hotels, and I knew I know a lot about working at night, as I was working night shifts already earlier (in the small small hotel that I was writing about before). But now I know that I knew nothing.

Well, let's see how my night schedule combo worked out. Three night shifts in a row passed by as following:

Night No1
Right at this moment I am standing at the reception watching the darkness of the night dissapear gradually to change into a bright (or not so) day, while my older (when it comes to both age and experience) colleague is taking a nap in the back. Quite a long nap, if you would ask me. It's been 2 hours already. At times I'm doing everything especially quietly, thinking how sweet it is that he felt asleep, but then I get angry. Why the hell is he sleeping while I am completely awake?! And I want to turn on the vacuum the loudest possible or shut the door with all my might..... but well, who cares anyway.

Although the weather has been dim and rainy for a few days now, the guests seem to be enjoying night life. The group of guys who came in Hammer comes back slowly one by one (or two). Some are dancing around the lobby while fighting their drunken state, some of them are quietly slipping inside the elvator. Some are waving to me and saying hell and asking me what am I still doing here. Good question ^^;

Well, I love my job now. I get free food too! On Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays our hotel organizes buffets - which means you can buy a ticket and eat all you want. Last month it was Indian food, this month - asparagus dishes. I never tried eating asparagus before. It's weird, but tasty, I think, now that I tried it. We are getting the leftovers. Yummy~! Much better than Indian food and red-coloured chicken, believe me!


Night No 2
I've just put down the phone, but I'm still feeling something close to displeasure or disgust. Oh, while I was writing this sentence the phone rang again... damn, and again.
The time I was waiting for has come, but instead of amusement and fun that I had been expecting, I feel all the things that I just wrote about. Boring.

You know, when you're working at night, especially over the weekend, the thing you should expect to happen sooner or later, is a prank call. It has to happen at least once. And I was quite anticipation it. I know of The Jerky Boys doing all kinds of phone pranks, I was always enjoying them and I wish to be the one on the phone. I wished to be a part of smart and funny prank call....

I'm picking up the phone. 'Blablabla How can I help you?' - I ask after introducing the name of the hotel and its location, just as I am taught.
'I am calling from FBI. We were getting some calls from this number. I think it must be some kind of joke.' - I hear.
'I'm very sorry, sir. But I'm not aware of anypne calling you from here'
'But we were getting a lot of calls today and it's getting out of hand already....' - the caller is continuing.
Ok. It's interesting, I'm thinking, but for now let's play along.
'It might be one of our guests, sir. It might be that our number is showing when they are calling outside numbers from their rooms' - I reply.
'Oh, actually the caller said he's name is Rodriguez'
'I will check that, sir' - I replied, and, believe me or not, I actually checked it. Just in case it was real (sic!) - 'There is no guests like this in our hotel'
'But he said so, he even told me his first name, it was....'
'Sir, if it were a prank call, the caller wouldn't tell you their real name anyway' - I said.
'Errrr...' - I guess the prank is over, I thought, but no! At this time someone started talking in Polish: 'Why are you calling me, please don't call me again!'
Sigh.
That's when it started. They started connecting the call with other people, making weird noises, saying kinda perverted things (to be honest I didn't really get what they were saying, I just heard nipples, so I didn't want to hear the rest).
I hung up.

Another call. Another bullshit.

Another call. Weird noises.

Another call. No sound at all.

Give me a break, man! Think of something more fun, dammit!


Night No 3
This time, we're three people working the night shift, and I really don't know what to do with myself. The two co-workers working with me are professionals, they complete all the tasks before I even think about them. Well, I can learn a lot. But then again one girl is a shift leader, so this time I can waste my time, like I did yesterday for example. She also seems to be quite particular and detailed. Which is a good thing again. The bad thing is that every time I'm on the same shift as her, the food in our canteen for workers is bad. Seriously.

The guy who works with me everyday over this weekend is sleeping as usual in the back, the shift leader went to find some food in the kitchen and I'm secretly writing this blog. This night was no special at all. I got a sunflower seed cake from one nice girl from housekeeping and that's all. Man, I'm tired!

Oh. And one funny thing. To log on to our hotel system we have special logins created from the first letter of our given name and two letters from the last name. Mine is POK, so obviously I gained a new nickname, which is...

... Pokemon....

I know nothing except the fact of my ignorance.

It's been a while since I wrote something. And a few things changed over the past weeks. First of all, we have spring already in Poland too. The weather was very unstable lately, giving us snow and sun, rain and clouds, but finally the weather forecast seems promising with temperatures around 18-22 Celsius degrees, sun and little rain.

Secondly, I am continuing my part-time job in 5 star hotel and gradually I'm getting used to procedures, nature of the guests and the whole atmosphere at work. Everyone is very nice to me (one person even called me Pam!!!), we have free food (sometimes we even get some exquisite desserts), I got my own stamp with my name, so I can mark all the invoives made by me. I meet Lufthansa flight crew everyday, as we always have 10 rooms for the crew. They are usually coming twice a day, 5 people at once and leaving also 5 people a time. And the other thing is, we have a lot of important people coming.

This month we have a so-called Off Camera Festival on in Kraków, so many actors, actresses, script writers and directors are coming to participate. Although it's an independent movie's festival, the most famous actors in Poland (and also some foreign ones too) came. I'm not a fan of Polish movies or TV series, so I'm very thankful to the notes someone left next to every guest's name, like 'an actor', 'director of this and this movie', 'script writer, won a competition somewhere'. Last time when some people came to check-in, one of the bellboys stood next to me, took a piece of paper and wrote: "Did you watch today's 'Good morning TVN' programme on TVN channel?". I denied withut hesitation, I don't even have a TV in my room. "This guy was in the programme. He's famous" - was another thing my colleague wrote. Oh cool. I looked at the guests, who didn't stand out of other guests coming to our hotel everyday. Well, maybe the tattoos everywhere made him look a bit underground, but it didn't make him look famous or anything. Everyone was talking about who will stay in our hotel and how famous they are, but I didn't know those people at all! Am i that ignorant to our Polish fames? I asked Mr. Google about some of the people others were talking about. They really were famous actresses! He really was well-known script writer! Oh, and the other nice guy was actually a movie director! Ah, and the smiling lady was quite famous too! They were all marked as VIP guests, and we had some small gifts waiting for them in their rooms (our best rooms of course). But honestly, famous people are people too. I don't know what is more rude - to recognize those famous people and be so excited about it, or not recognize them at all (of course, the VIP status is marked in the system, so no way one could forget about it).

To end this post, I want to share my discovery. A small shop next to my block of flats has a new item on sale!

Extra sour, Liquid filled CAMEL BALLS!

 The new type of bubble gum called Camel Balls, gluten free. I really wonder how did something like this happen? I mean, how could someone think of creating camel balls bubble gum for children. Would you dare to chew on camel balls? What if the kids take it too literary and when they go on a trip to Egypt and they try to chew on the actual ones?
I think I'll buy a few for my nephews! ;)

Live as if you were living a second time, and as though you had acted wrongly the first time.

After quite not as big failure as I thought it was (look: one post earlier), I started my new job.

'Trainee' means don't get angry on me, Mr Guest.

It's as cool and as hard, as I thought it is this time. It's never boring at the reception. In my earlier job, I was sitting there and waiting and wishing for someone to go inside and then, even not caring anymore, as all the rooms were already taken and I was checking my facebook for the 10000th time and watching movies on my night shifts and it was a job I could actually learn in 2 days and be able to do it normally already.

But here it's different. There is always something to do, things to check, guests coming in and out to ask for your assistance. Hotel system is the most popular one in big hotels, thanks god not Fidelio, but Opera, which looks quite similar to the ones I was working on in China (although still more difficult). I will get my uniform next month maybe, all the stamps with my name, IDs for systems and official e-mail address will be created for me as soon as I deliver them some missing documents.

But, as it is a hotel, it's work connected with people. And believe me or not, this is what I like the most. On my very first shift, I could meet a group of older Americans, who looked like Asians actually, with a nice tour leader called Mike, who sometimes was nice and sometimes I was thinking that he's slowly crosing the thin line of what is a joke and impertinency, but there was actually nothing I could do, but give him a killer smile and thank him for everything (making me slowly loose my patience). There was also a situation in our room, where a guest peed on his bed, which made the matrees damaged. It added him 150 pln to his room charge and a terrified looks on receptionists' faces when we heard about it on the shift-change meeting.

Another thing is that after my Emirates fail, I'm still not over the flight attendant idea of mine. And working where I work from now, I will not forget about it. Why? Because everyday we have at least 5 people from Lufthansa flight crew staying with us. But when I told my new coworkers that I want to see stewardesses in uniforms, because I think it's cool, they laughed at me. "Come on, the flight attendants coming to our hotel are usually older ladies" - one girl said. "I'm working here for 1 year and 5 months and I've only seen around 7 beautiful flight attendants from Lufthansa" - one guy added with a serious face - "One came yesterday".
"But the pilots are better" - added the Girl No 1 - "Although they are older, they look quite ok". I think I can believe her statement, because I saw her husband, who's quite a guy. No matter what they say though, I want to see uniformed staff of some airlines and I'm looking forward to it.

I had another reflection too. I think all the things that I plan or wish about doing come to me very slowly. Like, when I started Japanese studies, I wanted to go to Japan, but it became possible only after considerable amout of time passed. When I started thinking about going to China, it was more than a year after I managed to. Working in a good hotel? It took me quite some months to start my current job. So, every year can be named somehow:
Year 2011: LD year (ok, now, that's a shortcut for something I'm not really ready to confess yet haha)
Year 2012: Chinese year.
Year 2013: I hope it will become Hotel&Dance year.

And 2014 is MY year, the year of Horse, so I believe it's when everything goes my way~~~!