And by everything I mean two things. But lets not get ahead of ourselves. I’ve decided to re-start my blogging for absolutely no reason at all, and I hope this reason continues to motivate me till I leave, because really there’s so much to write about. About the people, the life, the…uuh. Yea.
The more time I spend working in this hotel the more I realize that everything here is different from everywhere else. Normally, there is a head waiter with an assistant that have a certain number of tables each- say 7 or 8. Here they split the restaurant in 2, and then add a bunch of assistants that scurry around in constant panic, trying to do everything at once. Normal hotels have a separate department for room service which are fully equipped and able to deal with the customer’s orders. Here they pick an assistant waiter, give him a bunch of trays and a bicycle and send him off into the unknown. Of course, normal hotels aren’t in Bora Bora.
As my boss so eloquently put it: ‘We don’t want people to order room service.’ Why? Cuz we’re just not equipped to deal with it. What happens is that the customer calls the restaurant, places the order, we tell the kitchen, prepare a tray, wrap the food in plastic-wrap, stick it on the tray, stick the tray on the bicycle, arrive at the bungalow, remove the plastic (which has now fused with the food) and knock on the door. Our hotel can house 160 people, so if they all order room service at once, I have a heart attack and die. And that’s not good. So we rasied the price of the room menu and put disgusting things on it (think anything french), and that keeps it down to about 3 or 4 orders per night.
I’d gotten to like doing room service- it was something new, interesting, and you got to bike around the hotel grounds a lot. Of course, that was before it started getting old and boring. Tonight I had 10 orders. That’s a record. That’s complete chaos. Plus, they had forgotten to prepare my trays before service, so it took twice the time to get the stuff out, cuz every time we got an order I had to go steal things like knives, salt, and napkins from the restaurant (we’re kinda low on supplies).
So, back to the stuff that happened: I was coming back from picking up a tray, in a hurry cuz I had 2 more waiting for me in the kitchen, and I realize that my pedals don’t work anymore. I’m pedaling but its not getting to the bike. I think the chain’s come off the gears, so I try pedaling some more to get it to hook back on, then-Whoom! The bike gives way, the right wheel falls off (I got 3 wheels) and the bike spins over on its side. Great. So I pick up my wheel and go ask reception for the maintenance people’s phone number. Bicycles hate me.
Then another thing happened, a very cool thing. I was out on the over-water bungalows retrieving another tray. I saw a bright light in the sky, so I looked up got to see the end of a shooting star. It only lasted for half a second, but it was beautiful. It sparked the sky, with a tail of light that scarred it like a line of smoldering ashes put in fast-forward. And then it was gone, As if it never happened. And what’s that quote about the tree falling in the forest supposed to mean?
