Foreign Perspectives

Hope ‘yall had a good Christmas and New Year.

The French family started arriving at 3pm on the 31st (well, two hours late isn’t bad for France, is it?) and it was all go from then ’til 1pm today. We didn’t get to bed ’til about 2.30am and had to get up again at 6.30am to get the breakfast out. Saturday night wasn’t so bad as we had a think and put the tea & coffee out in the lobby which gave us a chance to clear the restaurant a bit earlier and get to bed at 12.30 and we’d not to get up ’til 7.30 as we only had a couple of people taking breakfast and the rest hanging around for the brunch at 11.

Of course, it was all go during the day too. Saturday seemed to be one continuous meal from 9am through to midnight. The breakfast dragged out ’til almost noon with the stragglers from the night before. That in turn delayed lunch from the planned 12.30 to more like 2.30pm. French lunches are, of course, pretty drawn out affairs at the best of times and when you’ve no where to go afterwards it’s even worse. Anyway, we ended up doing the high tea (with genuine freshly cooked scones) a little after 6pm instead of 4.30. And, naturally, the dinner didn’t have a hope of starting at our hoped for 7pm, kicking off at more like 8.30pm.

The amount of food they got through was phenomenal. As, of course, are the scaps. We completely filled our restaurant size bin by lunchtime on Saturday so it’ll be topped up again after they empty it in the morning. We’ll be tossing out something like a dozen full baguettes (French bread to us foreigners). Not to mention half a crate of clementines (baby oranges), much the same amount of grapes, a mini mountain of stawberries,… You just don’t appreciate how much is left over after a meal ’til you’re clearing up after 23 of them! You also don’t fully appreciate just how big this place is ’til you spend two days walking back and forth between the two kitchens, the restaurant….

Amazingly, we only had one problem the whole time! Seems that the water heating system doesn’t work anything like I assumed that it did. On Saturday evening, we thought that it was an off-peak thing but it seems not as the water is now boiling. We still don’t know how it really works as it shouldn’t be warm yet if it’s an offpeak system. Still, we now know that we may hit a problem if we’ve 23 people in but that it’s OK with about 15 in (we’d about that many in the summer). I’m also quite amazed that a fuse didn’t blow with all the electric going full blast (every room in the place was like a sauna when we went in to clean them this afternoon). Well, actually a fuse did blow but it wasn’t ours as the neighbours power was off too.

Way back in October when we accepted the booking, we figured that we’d take the rest of this week off to recover but it hasn’t worked out like that. We already had a booking for four Australians for tomorrow but on Saturday night we took a three day booking for some Germans and this morning we picked up a reservation for this evening from one of the booking systems we’re on. So we don’t even get one night off :(( or should that be :)) It must be the start of the new year booking season as we’ve also got a reservation for a few days in March from another system. Oh, almost forgot… one system even managed to let through a booking with a duff credit card number for nine days starting last Thursday (don’t know what we’d have done if the credit card number was valid as we’d used every single room in the place for the family booking). Anyway, this coming week is looking fairly full with the French this evening, Australians tomorrow, Germans for Tuesday and Wednesday, some Spanish from Thursday to Sunday and it’s still the weekend (most folk book during working hours… just as well their companies don’t forbid such things in their IT security policies, eh?).