we have jobs!

Well, kind of. We'd seen in the hostel welcome packet that there was an option to stay for free in exchange for a few hours of 'light housework' per day. Our French roommate has been doing it for the past week or so, and said it wasn't bad - the time flies because you're working with other backpackers. After the orientation we stopped by to ask Michelle, the head of housekeeping, if there were any openings. We were thinking of starting tomorrow, but they needed us right away so we ditched our plans to open bank accounts and picked up mops, buckets, rags and a vacuum and got our orders from Ronnie, our supervisor. He's really nice and fairly amusing - a world traveler who just got back from home, the Philippines, three days ago.

I also have a new name, Leslie. Ronnie thinks this is my name and by the time I realized it wasn't mine it seemed like it was kind of too late to correct him. Hopefully the accomodation credit will go to the right person! Since most of the housekeeping is done mid-day, and we'd gotten back from orientation in the afternoon, we were the only ones working and we were assigned to wall-washing rather than bed-making. Qualmark, a travel certification organization (maybe kind of like AAA?) was coming to inspect the hostel, so the lobby had to sparkle. One disadvantage of working in the lobby rather than in rooms is that everyone gets to see you with your plastic gloves, old gloves, etc. And of course we saw everyone we knew. Fun! This was not quite how I envisioned spending my birthday.

We got in trouble for finishing our assigned tasks too quickly (washing walls, cleaning lights, scrubbing elevator doors while elevators were still in service), despite attempts to slow down - we'd only killed an hour of the three required. We were left to our own devices for a while, so we decided to clean each and every leaf on both ficus trees in the lobby in the remaining two hours. The trees are rented, so there's a good chance they'll just be swapping them out before the inspection, but whatever - who knows what other tasks we could have been assigned!

The three hours didn't go by ask quickly as our roommate Lusi had promised, but we did manage to entertain ourselves laughing about how we were not exactly putting our college degrees to good use, wondering if we should send in a notice to the UVA alumni magazine for that section which broadcasts important life changes including promotions, calculating what percentage of our old salaries we were making, etc. We also had some fun chatting with people coming through the lobby or riding the elevator.

It was Michelle's birthday, too, so the cleaning staff invited us to have a piece of cake with them after we were done - it was carrot cake, my traditional birthday cake! It wasn't nearly as good as yours, Mom, but it still tasted delicious since we'd been working hard and hadn't had a real lunch.

Photo: See the lobby sparkle? Don't the leaves look nice?