I've just got back from hiking up to First and then Stand, a total ascent of about 1300m as the cablecar has stopped running to Allmenalp for Autumn. It feels like I haven't written anything for ages, which is odd because I haven't really been doing that much lately. I've been in a bit of slump where I would rather sit in and read books on the Kindle than go to the Crystal (not Dessies, which has been closed for about three weeks now but is due to reopen tomorrow, to the great excitement of the Pinkies and the trepidation of their bank managers) or head down to socialise with the Dutch Work Party, who arrived just after the Spanish Work Party left. Sadly, the staff team just don't seem to be gelling in the same way with the Dutch as we did with the Spanish. They work just as hard, but there was something more open and friendly about the Spanish as they raked leaves or dug out tree roots in the campsite. And speaking of all things outdoorsy, I have been officially signed off to drive Chloe (tractor) and Leena (transporter), which is very exciting! It meant that I got to spend all of Monday morning driving between the Wood Compound in the campsite and the wood store in the Chalet, filling it up for the winter to come, and then in the afternoon I was transporting loads of leaves to the dumping ground we have set aside in the campsite for such things- that was a lot of fun as I had to climb into the back of Leena when it was raised up in order to help the leaves out- for a bunch of dead things they were bloody hard to move! But other than that, I haven't done much. I think it's because I've had quite a few weeks with a lot of catering, or so it seems.
At KISC, we are all supposed to have roughly the same amount of time in the various areas of the centre- house, catering, grounds, and maintenance. Some are limited, namely maintenance and grounds, because of the weather and other factors. Also, if you prove yourself chronically unable to work in the kitchen without setting yourself and other people on fire then they will probably put you down with the washing machines more often. However at the moment it seems that some of us have more catering than others (namely me) and others have more house (the girls). Of course I may just be imagining it all, but I had catering four times last week and while I don't dislike any of the jobs we have to do here at the centre, four twelve-hour days a week is quite tiring and it's hard to motivate yourself when you're exhausted! Thankfully this week I only have two days of catering all told, so it's nice to have a bit of a break and to work a usual day. Tomorrow I am in Maintenance, which will be fun as it's only the second time I've been in and hopefully by now all the insulation is finished (the insulation seems to sit in the wall and people's hair with equal ease, ifthe other people who have done it are anything to go by)
Also this week we have the Ruechestei 2011. This is an incident hike taking place at night, and KISC have entered a team to compete against the Rover Scouts of the Bernese Kanton. It should be fun; the story for the event is that a fictional town has been hit by an earthquake and each team is a family who is being evacuated. Unfortuately, as the shortie who seems to have the most German (I should never have been so loquacious at the dinner we had with all the centre's suppliers a few weeks back) I have been given the role of father of this family. I and my family (so far I have a cousin, a great-granddaughter and possibly a brother) have to make a list of things that we want the crisis team to get from our house and take to the evacuation place, and we have to choose three important items that we are going to take with us on the hike (the list is fictional). To this end I have been practicing my German, mainly on a hairdresser who cut my hair (for a massive thirty francs, which I then discovered had been wasted as Jenneke could have done the same job at the centre for free. Bum.) and it was very satisfying, as I managed to understand her and she managed to understand me!
That's all for now, so next time hopefully you will hear how we did at Ruechestei, and whether or not I have gone mad with too much time in the kitchen, and whether or not I've crashed Chloe or Leena yet... watch this space!
Wednesday 26 October 2011
Thursday 20 October 2011
Murder, friends and sunburn
Hello again,
Two things of varying degrees of inevitability have happened since the last blog: I have joined the PR and Marketing team, and I have been voted the Smile of the Week today. The former was always going to happen, given my love of talking and a platform upon which to do it. The sceond was not strictly inevitable, but bearing in mind that there are only 20 of us here at KISC this Autumn and about 16 weeks of the Autumn Season, there was a fair chance that I would get voted in at some point. Sarcasm aside, however, it is an honour to have my arrangement of face so highly acclaimed, and I have been also allowed to write an entry in the Think Pink! blog which is on the KISC Website here. In addition to that blog, one of the points that came out of the first PR and Marketing team meeting (which sadly was only myself and Pol, the PR and Marketing Assistant here) was that maybe a second blog was required on the website, which would require regular updating to supplement the Smile of the Week blog. So watch this space, my portfolio of written work may well be about to expand...
Other than that, it has been another fun week here in the middle of the Alps. Life is mostly back to normal in the wake of the floods, and we have just about got used to the new tree sat across the island in the river outside the chalet. The Dutch Work Party have arrived, and the Spanish have gone home. Their fiesta fiesta which I mentioned last time was a fantastic event, which had most of us wandering around the centre the next morning looking like moles who have had their warren subject to a round of shelling, jumping at loud noises and complaining at the brightness of the lights. The Dutch were not expected to throw any parties of such magnitude; if anything, I got the impression that we were going to be aided for two weeks by a bunch of geriatrics. However, they seem quite young, and capable of throwing a party so we will have to wait and see. I won't be seeing very much of them this week, however, because Kat is coming over to visit for three days, so hopefully I shall have the opportunity to get up some more mountains and maybe head over to Spiz (pronounced "Shpeatz", lest it's confused with the German word for "horny") to see the second hand outdoors shop. Sadly, in preparation for her visit, my face has gone into full teenager mode, throwing grease out like some sort of spinning deep-fat fryer, though on the plus side this gives me an opportunity to use the facewash I found in the laundry without worrying that it will dry my face out too much (the cold here is destroying my skin! Ahem.)
Another interesting thing that has happened is that I managed kill Miguel. Not literally, of course, but the staff are playing what we un the UK would call redrum, a game where you are given a target, a location and an object, and you have to bring all three components together in order to "kill" the target. If you are killed you have to give your target to your killer, and so they progress until eventually they kill the person who has to kill them, and they have won. I managed to get Miguel in the International Friendship Room with the Salad Bar (which usually lives in the dining room, at the opposite end of the chalet) and even when I asked him to touch the salad bar he didn't quiet understand what was going on. Unfortunately for me, my next target, Jenneke, saw this and as she already knew exactly where and what Miguel had to kill her with, she is now going to be very hard to get. I have considered many plans, some of which involve the Swiss Army, but in the end I will probably have to get someone to help me tie her up and carry her into the Whiskey Bar (a half-finished building in the basement, just off 'the Laundry Cave'). I will keep you posted on how I am doing with the murder game, but for the record this was in fact my second murder: Before Miguel I enlisted the aid of one of the the Spanish Work Party to get Myriam (General director and general boss of KISC) into the Australia room where I hit her with a condom. I had debated long and hard about whether or not to open said condom first, but I thought that touching my boss with an open condom was just a bridge too far. Thankfully she was not fussy about the particulars of the murder.
Anyway, again I have looked at the time and seen that I have a scant thirty minutes before I have to dash and cook dinner for everyone. Vanya is probably not coming back in after this morning as she was looking rather peaky, and for some reason people get very unreasonable when they see the cook sneezing into the soup. So I shall sign off here and go see what everyone else is up to; my two compadres who are due in the kitchen went for a bike ride so I'm hoping that they make it back in time to actually cook some dinner with me!
Two things of varying degrees of inevitability have happened since the last blog: I have joined the PR and Marketing team, and I have been voted the Smile of the Week today. The former was always going to happen, given my love of talking and a platform upon which to do it. The sceond was not strictly inevitable, but bearing in mind that there are only 20 of us here at KISC this Autumn and about 16 weeks of the Autumn Season, there was a fair chance that I would get voted in at some point. Sarcasm aside, however, it is an honour to have my arrangement of face so highly acclaimed, and I have been also allowed to write an entry in the Think Pink! blog which is on the KISC Website here. In addition to that blog, one of the points that came out of the first PR and Marketing team meeting (which sadly was only myself and Pol, the PR and Marketing Assistant here) was that maybe a second blog was required on the website, which would require regular updating to supplement the Smile of the Week blog. So watch this space, my portfolio of written work may well be about to expand...
Other than that, it has been another fun week here in the middle of the Alps. Life is mostly back to normal in the wake of the floods, and we have just about got used to the new tree sat across the island in the river outside the chalet. The Dutch Work Party have arrived, and the Spanish have gone home. Their fiesta fiesta which I mentioned last time was a fantastic event, which had most of us wandering around the centre the next morning looking like moles who have had their warren subject to a round of shelling, jumping at loud noises and complaining at the brightness of the lights. The Dutch were not expected to throw any parties of such magnitude; if anything, I got the impression that we were going to be aided for two weeks by a bunch of geriatrics. However, they seem quite young, and capable of throwing a party so we will have to wait and see. I won't be seeing very much of them this week, however, because Kat is coming over to visit for three days, so hopefully I shall have the opportunity to get up some more mountains and maybe head over to Spiz (pronounced "Shpeatz", lest it's confused with the German word for "horny") to see the second hand outdoors shop. Sadly, in preparation for her visit, my face has gone into full teenager mode, throwing grease out like some sort of spinning deep-fat fryer, though on the plus side this gives me an opportunity to use the facewash I found in the laundry without worrying that it will dry my face out too much (the cold here is destroying my skin! Ahem.)
Another interesting thing that has happened is that I managed kill Miguel. Not literally, of course, but the staff are playing what we un the UK would call redrum, a game where you are given a target, a location and an object, and you have to bring all three components together in order to "kill" the target. If you are killed you have to give your target to your killer, and so they progress until eventually they kill the person who has to kill them, and they have won. I managed to get Miguel in the International Friendship Room with the Salad Bar (which usually lives in the dining room, at the opposite end of the chalet) and even when I asked him to touch the salad bar he didn't quiet understand what was going on. Unfortunately for me, my next target, Jenneke, saw this and as she already knew exactly where and what Miguel had to kill her with, she is now going to be very hard to get. I have considered many plans, some of which involve the Swiss Army, but in the end I will probably have to get someone to help me tie her up and carry her into the Whiskey Bar (a half-finished building in the basement, just off 'the Laundry Cave'). I will keep you posted on how I am doing with the murder game, but for the record this was in fact my second murder: Before Miguel I enlisted the aid of one of the the Spanish Work Party to get Myriam (General director and general boss of KISC) into the Australia room where I hit her with a condom. I had debated long and hard about whether or not to open said condom first, but I thought that touching my boss with an open condom was just a bridge too far. Thankfully she was not fussy about the particulars of the murder.
Anyway, again I have looked at the time and seen that I have a scant thirty minutes before I have to dash and cook dinner for everyone. Vanya is probably not coming back in after this morning as she was looking rather peaky, and for some reason people get very unreasonable when they see the cook sneezing into the soup. So I shall sign off here and go see what everyone else is up to; my two compadres who are due in the kitchen went for a bike ride so I'm hoping that they make it back in time to actually cook some dinner with me!
Wednesday 12 October 2011
Rain, Spain, and the first Snow of Autumn
Unfortunately, the flood which hit the Kander region on Monday knocked out our Internet connection, with the result that I could only get back on today, though that is better than the Friday they had estimated for us. Heavy rain and a fall of snow in the last few days made it swell to the point of making the bridge that is the main access point to KISC impassable for fears of huge logs taking you with them, and in Gasterntal (the beautiful valley just up the river from us) fully one third of their infrastructure was reportedly washed away. The Swiss Army, some of whom were fortunately staying at the Tower for training (the Tower is a building on the campsite), went into the village to help pump out cellars, as did some of the Pinkies yesterday, and things have largely returned to normal by now- the sun is back out, there aren't many clouds in the sky, and Olave the centre cat still likes to hide under the Coke Machine.
The Spanish Work Party arrived the day before the flood- good thing too, as they probably wouldn't have made it here if they had been travelling after the flood! They seem a barrel of laughs, even though for the most part I can't understand what they're saying unless they are talking to me in English. I've been asking Miguel to teach me phrases in Spanish, but by the time the work party arrived my attempt at fluency had been limited to saying hello, asking for drinks, and the word for "sheep" and "river", which aren't much use unless I'm talking to a farmer. However we were chatting amicably to them one evening when they produced a laminated sheet of A4 with more phrases for us to learn! "Bienvenudo de la tren de l'amor" was one such phrase... you can look it up in your own time but needless to say that I'm still not fluent in Spanish.
For those of you who are wondering what on earth a work party actually is, they are simply groups who turn up and stay for free in exchange for doing work on the campsite. So far they have mainly been raking leaves and, on the day when they couldn't get over to the campsite because the bridge was a log-filled death-hole, deep cleaning rooms in the Old Chalet. They are also quite good at football, and KISC plays them every time they visit. As far as I know we haven't won yet (or ever), but we came mightily close last night, and managed to get a smile from the one Spanish staff member who can actually play football while the rest of us stumble about the pitch like asthmatic penguins. Tonight we have been invited to the Spanish Work Party Party, which is supposed to be an event of some magnificence and which I am rather looking forward to! Poor Johan was tricked by Jenneke, the House Manager, into swapping duties so that he is on duty today, and he is not happy about that one bit. To make matters worse, Jenneke hasn't been in today- she went home yesterday with a bad cold and hasn't been seen since- so she might not end up going in any event!
I did mention earlier that we had some snow, and since most people reading this are British (in fact I think they all might be!) that is obviously a subject worth returning to. Down at Chalet level we only had 5 or 6 inches (now that I like in the Alps I can officially start throwing around phrases like 'only 5 or 6 inches') but on Saturday afternoon some of us took the cable car up to Sunnbuel and found as much as 40cm of snow just lying around, asking to be thrown and sledded on. Our sledding attempts were frankly pathetic, since the snow was too wet and soft to do anything other than give way, so our sleds just sank, but the snowball throwing went pretty well and when we got back to the cable car station we found a live radio show from the restaurant of traditional German music, which Kyle and I managed to enjoy for a whole hour on our half day off while the others headed down to start catering at 4. We even manged to have a nice snowball fight on the front lawn of KISC the next day- in the same spot that 24 hours later was covered in muddy water being washed down at a frightening speed form the mountains. The weather here is definitely strange!
Since my last blog we have also used the sauna for the first time this season. The sauna is a genuine Finnish build which was donated to the Netherlands Jamboree either in 1937 or 1995 (those are the two date for the jamborees in the Netherlands, and I don't know which it is!). After the jamboree the decision was made to take it apart and send it to KISC, presumably because with several thousand Scouts attending it was quite hard to decide who should take it home. It is wood-fuelled, which means that someone has to sit with it and tend the fire until it's ready, the honour of which fell to me. It was dark, and I was on my own, in a log cabin on the campsite which looks rather like a creepy wood at first glance. I was also terrified that one of my fellow pinkies was going to walk up and make me jump by staring in at the window like a serial killer of a zombie would do. Thankfully nobody did, and we had a lovely sauna with beer, manly chat, and a surprising amount of nudity for a group of people who have only known each other a month. Instead of a lake or some snow we had buckets of water to cool off with, which was great fun to listen to when someone else did it, and I can't wait for the next Sauna! We were due to have one on Monday, but the flood sort of got in the way of that.
Anyway, I have just realised that I have spent my whole lunch sat behind this laptop, and so I now have to go to catering to cook dinner for over 70 people. Must just keep thinking of the party afterwards! I also have a new KISC neckerchief to cheer me up if things get too grim, so off I go!
The Spanish Work Party arrived the day before the flood- good thing too, as they probably wouldn't have made it here if they had been travelling after the flood! They seem a barrel of laughs, even though for the most part I can't understand what they're saying unless they are talking to me in English. I've been asking Miguel to teach me phrases in Spanish, but by the time the work party arrived my attempt at fluency had been limited to saying hello, asking for drinks, and the word for "sheep" and "river", which aren't much use unless I'm talking to a farmer. However we were chatting amicably to them one evening when they produced a laminated sheet of A4 with more phrases for us to learn! "Bienvenudo de la tren de l'amor" was one such phrase... you can look it up in your own time but needless to say that I'm still not fluent in Spanish.
For those of you who are wondering what on earth a work party actually is, they are simply groups who turn up and stay for free in exchange for doing work on the campsite. So far they have mainly been raking leaves and, on the day when they couldn't get over to the campsite because the bridge was a log-filled death-hole, deep cleaning rooms in the Old Chalet. They are also quite good at football, and KISC plays them every time they visit. As far as I know we haven't won yet (or ever), but we came mightily close last night, and managed to get a smile from the one Spanish staff member who can actually play football while the rest of us stumble about the pitch like asthmatic penguins. Tonight we have been invited to the Spanish Work Party Party, which is supposed to be an event of some magnificence and which I am rather looking forward to! Poor Johan was tricked by Jenneke, the House Manager, into swapping duties so that he is on duty today, and he is not happy about that one bit. To make matters worse, Jenneke hasn't been in today- she went home yesterday with a bad cold and hasn't been seen since- so she might not end up going in any event!
I did mention earlier that we had some snow, and since most people reading this are British (in fact I think they all might be!) that is obviously a subject worth returning to. Down at Chalet level we only had 5 or 6 inches (now that I like in the Alps I can officially start throwing around phrases like 'only 5 or 6 inches') but on Saturday afternoon some of us took the cable car up to Sunnbuel and found as much as 40cm of snow just lying around, asking to be thrown and sledded on. Our sledding attempts were frankly pathetic, since the snow was too wet and soft to do anything other than give way, so our sleds just sank, but the snowball throwing went pretty well and when we got back to the cable car station we found a live radio show from the restaurant of traditional German music, which Kyle and I managed to enjoy for a whole hour on our half day off while the others headed down to start catering at 4. We even manged to have a nice snowball fight on the front lawn of KISC the next day- in the same spot that 24 hours later was covered in muddy water being washed down at a frightening speed form the mountains. The weather here is definitely strange!
Since my last blog we have also used the sauna for the first time this season. The sauna is a genuine Finnish build which was donated to the Netherlands Jamboree either in 1937 or 1995 (those are the two date for the jamborees in the Netherlands, and I don't know which it is!). After the jamboree the decision was made to take it apart and send it to KISC, presumably because with several thousand Scouts attending it was quite hard to decide who should take it home. It is wood-fuelled, which means that someone has to sit with it and tend the fire until it's ready, the honour of which fell to me. It was dark, and I was on my own, in a log cabin on the campsite which looks rather like a creepy wood at first glance. I was also terrified that one of my fellow pinkies was going to walk up and make me jump by staring in at the window like a serial killer of a zombie would do. Thankfully nobody did, and we had a lovely sauna with beer, manly chat, and a surprising amount of nudity for a group of people who have only known each other a month. Instead of a lake or some snow we had buckets of water to cool off with, which was great fun to listen to when someone else did it, and I can't wait for the next Sauna! We were due to have one on Monday, but the flood sort of got in the way of that.
Anyway, I have just realised that I have spent my whole lunch sat behind this laptop, and so I now have to go to catering to cook dinner for over 70 people. Must just keep thinking of the party afterwards! I also have a new KISC neckerchief to cheer me up if things get too grim, so off I go!
Monday 3 October 2011
Sunshine, Mountains and a two whole weeks of real work!
I've just now, for the first time, put up the small table that is in the room Miguel and I share, so now I can type at a reasonable angle with the added bonus of being able to hear the sounds of sheep bells, cow bells, and birds (who oddly enough have not been outfitted with bells, although I suspect it's just a matter of time) drifting in through my window. Thirty minutes left of my lunchbreak, but when the afternoon's activity is strolling around the campsite with a lawnmower in the glorious sunshine, it's a bit hard to tell where break ends and work begins.
We are now two weeks into our time at KISC, and already it's getting hard to remember how long I've been here- I keep having a suspicious feeling that I've been here forever, but have somehow been missed off the staff boards from previous years. Speaking of staff boards, we did manage to get ours finished finally, and only a week late. It's in the style of a Pacman board, with the senior members of staff as Pacmen while the rest of us are either ghosts or fruit. Not a bad effort, and considering that by the end of it we really didn't care any more it could have gone a whole lot worse. And of course, finishing the staff board means that we now have access to the staff bikes! This has of course increased the range which we can rove about dramatically, although I managed to surpass myself by knackering my wrist before we had even been given the staff bikes to use! The fault mainly lies with Swiss bike manufacturers, who have unhelpfully put the brakes round the opposite way to English bikes, which means that when I get out of the pub and want to borrow a bike off a long term staff member to do an awesome skid, instead I end up doing front flips which result in a bandaged wrist and an X-ray (an X-ray which is now proudly taped to the window so people can see my healthy unbroken wrist, and is soon to be joined by Rikke's X-ray of her foot, which she hurt at football training last night). But my wrist didn't stop me from doing things like cleaning out a walk-in fridge, cleaning (and naming) trollies in the kitchen, mopping, or laying a floor in the Irish room, which is being renovated this Autumn.
Work here begins each day at 8am, with Thought for the Day. This is usually some sort of game, or little thing to get everyone awake for the day ahead, and also a good time for any notices about anything that needs mentioning. The exception to this is if you are working in catering, when you have to be in work at 7am to get breakfast ready for 7:30! Alternatively, if you are Kyle, then you sleep through until 7:56 and get woken up by your roommate with just enough time to get to Thought for the Day. Then we work through in whatever department we are in for the day until 10, when we have our first coffee break. Sometime between 10:15 and 10:30 we pick ourselves up again and carry on working until 12, when blessed lunch is served! If you aren't in catering you then get a lovely break until 2, when work begins again; catering have to clean up after lunch which is a bit sad, but they do then get a massive break (usually starting between 1 and 1:30) until 4:30, when they start getting dinner ready for 6. The rest of us get another coffee break at 4, and then work is officially over after dinner- time to kick back! Unless, that is, you are on duty. If you are on duty, then you have to man the phones during lunch and between the time dinner starts and 10:30pm. You also have to come up with a thought for the day, and help the kitchen with the cleaning up after lunch and dinner. A bit of a pain, but someone has to do it!
We are lucky in the Autumn season in that we get to work in all the areas of the centre's life: catering, house (laundry and cleaning), maintenance, grounds and on Sundays one of us gets to spend time in the admin office doing paper shuffling. And even that is quite fun, as for the minute it consists of scanning in the centre's collection of photographs, which is essentially an excuse to spend your day looking at various pictures of the chalet, learning about its history and suchlike. We've also nearly all had a go at being on duty on our own (our first duty was done with a long term staff member who could catch us before we did anything stupid like take a booking for four thousand lemmings staying in the sauna room, or something like that), which also means we've all missed something fun going on in the evening- on duty you are not allowed to drink or leave the chalet, so it's usually on the day you have duty that all the most exciting things happen. On my duty day, there was a flat warming party for one of the long term staff, but instead I had to stay in and check in French and German people, and take calls from the rest of the Short Term staff who got lost on the way to the flat warming party.
That said, it's not all work here. So far on my days off I have been up to Bunderspitz, and I have practically been up to the Jegertosse, which is an Alpine meadow, as well. I say practically because while we made it up to the alpine meadow that is the Jegertosse, the path we were following actually terminates at a wooden cross, a fact we only discovered upon getting back to KISC, when I asked Alexandros where the path went after Jegertosse. Turns out that we were only about 200m from the end of the path anyway, which is annoying but means that we could probably fudge it if anyone asks us whether we made it up there. Bunderspitz was much more exciting in some ways, as we were 400m higher than Jegertosse (2546m above sea level) and it was an actual top, which is more satisfying to stand on than a meadow (though the view while having lunch in a field with clouds below us was rather special, I must admit) This week coming I am planning to take a half day and climb the Via Ferata (essentially a permanent climbing route up a waterfall) and a full day to do the three valleys hike with some of the long term staff. Should be great fun!
We are now two weeks into our time at KISC, and already it's getting hard to remember how long I've been here- I keep having a suspicious feeling that I've been here forever, but have somehow been missed off the staff boards from previous years. Speaking of staff boards, we did manage to get ours finished finally, and only a week late. It's in the style of a Pacman board, with the senior members of staff as Pacmen while the rest of us are either ghosts or fruit. Not a bad effort, and considering that by the end of it we really didn't care any more it could have gone a whole lot worse. And of course, finishing the staff board means that we now have access to the staff bikes! This has of course increased the range which we can rove about dramatically, although I managed to surpass myself by knackering my wrist before we had even been given the staff bikes to use! The fault mainly lies with Swiss bike manufacturers, who have unhelpfully put the brakes round the opposite way to English bikes, which means that when I get out of the pub and want to borrow a bike off a long term staff member to do an awesome skid, instead I end up doing front flips which result in a bandaged wrist and an X-ray (an X-ray which is now proudly taped to the window so people can see my healthy unbroken wrist, and is soon to be joined by Rikke's X-ray of her foot, which she hurt at football training last night). But my wrist didn't stop me from doing things like cleaning out a walk-in fridge, cleaning (and naming) trollies in the kitchen, mopping, or laying a floor in the Irish room, which is being renovated this Autumn.
Work here begins each day at 8am, with Thought for the Day. This is usually some sort of game, or little thing to get everyone awake for the day ahead, and also a good time for any notices about anything that needs mentioning. The exception to this is if you are working in catering, when you have to be in work at 7am to get breakfast ready for 7:30! Alternatively, if you are Kyle, then you sleep through until 7:56 and get woken up by your roommate with just enough time to get to Thought for the Day. Then we work through in whatever department we are in for the day until 10, when we have our first coffee break. Sometime between 10:15 and 10:30 we pick ourselves up again and carry on working until 12, when blessed lunch is served! If you aren't in catering you then get a lovely break until 2, when work begins again; catering have to clean up after lunch which is a bit sad, but they do then get a massive break (usually starting between 1 and 1:30) until 4:30, when they start getting dinner ready for 6. The rest of us get another coffee break at 4, and then work is officially over after dinner- time to kick back! Unless, that is, you are on duty. If you are on duty, then you have to man the phones during lunch and between the time dinner starts and 10:30pm. You also have to come up with a thought for the day, and help the kitchen with the cleaning up after lunch and dinner. A bit of a pain, but someone has to do it!
We are lucky in the Autumn season in that we get to work in all the areas of the centre's life: catering, house (laundry and cleaning), maintenance, grounds and on Sundays one of us gets to spend time in the admin office doing paper shuffling. And even that is quite fun, as for the minute it consists of scanning in the centre's collection of photographs, which is essentially an excuse to spend your day looking at various pictures of the chalet, learning about its history and suchlike. We've also nearly all had a go at being on duty on our own (our first duty was done with a long term staff member who could catch us before we did anything stupid like take a booking for four thousand lemmings staying in the sauna room, or something like that), which also means we've all missed something fun going on in the evening- on duty you are not allowed to drink or leave the chalet, so it's usually on the day you have duty that all the most exciting things happen. On my duty day, there was a flat warming party for one of the long term staff, but instead I had to stay in and check in French and German people, and take calls from the rest of the Short Term staff who got lost on the way to the flat warming party.
That said, it's not all work here. So far on my days off I have been up to Bunderspitz, and I have practically been up to the Jegertosse, which is an Alpine meadow, as well. I say practically because while we made it up to the alpine meadow that is the Jegertosse, the path we were following actually terminates at a wooden cross, a fact we only discovered upon getting back to KISC, when I asked Alexandros where the path went after Jegertosse. Turns out that we were only about 200m from the end of the path anyway, which is annoying but means that we could probably fudge it if anyone asks us whether we made it up there. Bunderspitz was much more exciting in some ways, as we were 400m higher than Jegertosse (2546m above sea level) and it was an actual top, which is more satisfying to stand on than a meadow (though the view while having lunch in a field with clouds below us was rather special, I must admit) This week coming I am planning to take a half day and climb the Via Ferata (essentially a permanent climbing route up a waterfall) and a full day to do the three valleys hike with some of the long term staff. Should be great fun!
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