Where did all the time go?

I am starting to lose track of which day it is, which is disappointing; part of the problem is that I've stopped writing what I'm doing each day in my diary,  which means that I can't think to myself "I'm in House today, so it must be Wednesday". Instead, all I know is that I am definitely in House, and the question of what day it is has to be discarded in favour of easier questions, such as "how much GH31 detergent do I put in with a wash that is roughly 5/8 full, and therefore right in the middle of a half load and a 3/4 load?" (the answer, by the way, depends on what you are washing. Kitchen articles, for example, take more than Pinks!) And to make matters even worse, I am going to have to start paying attention to what day it is quite soon!


For example, Kat is coming on Friday this week, and staying until Tuesday- or Wednesday, I can't remember. This means that I need to know when Friday is, and when Tuesday or Wednesday are, and not get them in the wrong order and drop Kat off at the station before I've picked her up (or not picked her up, if I get Friday wrong too). Still with me? Good, because the Wednesday before Kat is here we have a General Staff Meeting, which means I not only have to know which day that Wednesday is, but also not confuse it with the next Wednesday and leave Kat on her own while I go to a meeting that happened the week before (assuming that she is even here on that Wednesday and that it wasn't the Tuesday which she was supposed to go). Also, on the Sunday that she is here, we have Staff Evaluations so I need to remember which day Sunday is. So, that's (maybe) two Wednesdays, a Tuesday (maybe), a Friday and a Sunday. Oh and then the Thursday after Kat's gone it's Staff Day Out... or was the Wednesday? No it might be Wednesday, in which case Kat definitely goes on Tuesday... or if she is really going on Wednesday then I've made a right hash of organising things! Then on the Friday after Kat leaves we are deep cleaning the staffroom, so I need to get Friday right or Miguel will get very upset when I try and vacuum his bed when he's still in it. Thankfully I can distinguish between morning and afternoon still, so it's actually unlikely that I'll vacuum Miguel's bed while he's still in it; more likely I'll have stolen all his bedlinen before he goes to bed on the wrong day.


Anyway, sorry for that long and confusing paragraph. I am quite tired from my journey to Our Chalet today. For the uninitiated among you, Our Chalet is an international centre for the World Association of Girl Guides and Girl Scouts (or WAGGGS, rather amusingly). It's essentially the same as KISC, I hear, but a bit smaller and rather prettier on the inside. I had a day off and an invitation from the maintenance guy over there, so I hiked over Bunderspitz and down to Adelboden, and amongst the plethora of chalets dotted around I finally found the one with a giant trefoil on it. Walking up, I was greeted by a rather friendly looking ginger cat, and I suppose it was my fault for picking it up but it still bit me, which I thought was unwelcoming to say the least. Setting aside whatever doubts I had germinating in the soil of my soul, however, I pressed on up to the chalet proper. A car was just pulling out as I got there, but there was still a car and a van left so I reasoned that there would be at least one person around. It is the quiet season after all, and the website said that they were renovating, but I figured that there must be someone around to feed the cat (or maybe not, which would explain the little horror from down the drive)
However, there was nobody there. The place seemed deserted. I knocked on a few doors, and peered in through a few windows, but nothing. It was like they'd seen a smelly boy coming up the drive, set the cat on me and all gone and hidden in the basement. I even rang the phone, to see if that could galvanise someone out of a cupboard of wherever they were hiding, but instead I just stared at the phone in the reception, three feet away from me, which stared back at me as it rung, and smugly remained unanswered. I sat down on a bench, hoping that the person who had driven off had just gone to the shops for a newspaper or something, and as I sat there two things happened: firstly, I remembered that Kristoff, who had invited me over in the first place, was on holiday and so not in. Secondly, another cat came and sat next to me. And then promptly started clawing at the bench. Understandably, I was a tad nervous. However, I didn't seem to be in immediate danger so I continued to sit there, refusing to be cowed by the threat of being shredded like a chicken. Understanding this, and obviously wishing to push the envelope a little further, the cat took an interest in my sandwich. It almost climbed into my lap to get to the sandwich, and when I gave it a corner of said sandwich it immediately ate the ham and cheese, and then left the bread! Speaking of sandwiches, have they always been spelt without the 'h' after the 'w'? Really? When did I start making that spelling mistake?!


Giving up on Our chalet as a bad job, I had to get the bus back home. At this stage I realised that I had no cash. This meant that I had to go all the way over to Adelboden to find a cash machine. Interestingly, it turns out that when they say that Our Chalet is in Adelboden, what they mean is that it's on the other side of a little valley and the village itself is set all the way up the hill, and the genius who designed the place thought that the best place for the cash machine was right at the top. So I missed my bus, and to be fair it could have been worse, but remember that I was still bearing a nasty cat bite and the disappointment of no girl guides to show me round their stupid centre, so it was a crushing end to the day! The hike itself was lovely, though; perfect weather, and no blisters which is always a bonus!


Anyway, I need to do some captions on the Facebook photos from my time here, so I guess that's all for now! And who knows, by the next blog post I might be a Pinkie no longer...

The Two-thirds-of-the-way-mark

The lights in the staffroom are terrible. The energy saving light bulbs seem to be saving energy by no actually illuminating anything, and the only saving grace is the lamp that stands near the window, which manages to single-handedly illuminate the entire room. It's the one thing that I would change about KISC if I had the opportunity; I love the work, the food is good, and the people are all wonderful, but my God the staffroom is dingy in the evenings!


The evenings are getting colder now; down to -6 on some nights. I only know this because Mum and Dad have just visited and I saw the temperature in the rental car they had for the trip. It was lovely to see them, and it also meant that I finally made it out of the valleys and into a real city- Bern. It's a beautiful city, though I wasn't entirely sure what to make of the architecture; some bits were very German, but there were some bits that you could convince yourself were Italian if it hadn't been for the freezing cold. I also managed to purchase (finally) a soft-shell jacket, at a very reasonable price, so the whole trip was really rather nice! However, they have now gone home again, leaving at 5am this morning to get the plane (and in typical Dad style, Dad took the room key with him!) They've taken some of my clothes home with them, so hopefully my bag should actually fit all my stuff in it properly for the return journey instead of bulging out at every angle, threatening to burst like an overstuffed pillow if I so much as look at it wrong. And also, them going home marks the two-thirds point of my stay here at KISC.


I am due home on the 20th December, staying for an additional 10 days as a helper while the new Shorties are trained up and some of the long-term staff are also trained up (apparently they need training too, and are not just born with the skills they need as it sometimes seems!). It's a strange period of time, because I'm unsure of whether to start reminiscing about the good times had in preparation for the journey home, or whether I should still be thinking that I have ages until I'm leaving this fantastic place. There is just over a month left of my time here; in some ways that is a long time (or will be if I start preparing to leave) and in other ways it's still quite a long time to go. In the meantime I'll just settle for cracking on with work. Two days in a row of catering this week, and despite my earlier grumbles in past posts about catering it has been a lot of fun. Wednesday morning saw me completely on my own, pottering around the kitchen washing up the three spoons that got used at breakfast and making what was (apparently) a very successful orange sponge cake for Pol's birthday. Today it's been me and Rikke, and after a devastatingly uneventful morning, in which the Spanish Omelet still managed to be about 10 minutes late due to the egg refusing to cook, we are looking at whipping up some soup and sweet and sour pork for dinner. Then hopefully this evening we shall be watching the Lord of the Rings (because any spare three hours in your life can hardly be filled with anything more suitable) and then, this weekend, I have a very exciting job. In the village this weekend there is some sort of fair going on, and KISC is having a large black German tent with a fire and some games. And I get to help run it! How cool is that?! I can't decide whether I am more excited about the tent or the fire or what, but I am very much looking forward to it, before getting back to work at the centre next week.


That's about all for now, I think I'll just read a bit more of my book before I get back in the kitchen...

Musings upon Britishness, the state of homeliness and the nature of time

The last two days in a row have seen some of us watching Monty Python films- The Meaning of Life, and And Now For Something Completely Different- and the welcome blast of Englishness has prepared me for my parents visiting tomorrow. It's strange how much I miss British speech; although hardly common, the odd "by Jove" and "I say" really make me feel at home! But thinking of being at home, it really is remarkable how quickly KISC came to feel like home. The familiarity of the centre has already reached the stage where moving something around- such as cooking in the guest kitchens while we deep-clean the normal kitchen- just doesn't feel right, and the return to the normal kitchen today actually caused a palpable wave of relief to flow through me. It's a shame, then, that I am already in my last four weeks as a shortie here at KISC!


Somehow, somewhere, the time has gone. It's not that I've not done anything while I've been here; last week Johan and I went up the Niesenbahn (the steepest funicular railway I've ever been on, and certainly the longest!) and saw some of the best views I've yet seen of the Kander valley. I've also done lots of work, including splitting tree trunks as big as tractor tyres and building a floor. It really is like they told us when we started; the time just disappears! Which, it must be said, is better than it crawling by. Which, paradoxically, it is doing now. I am on duty, which means that I can't go to bed until at least 10:30 in case one of the four guests we have in the chalet right now needs something. At 10:30 I have to go on a walk round the centre, making sure that all the right doors are locked, lights are off, and that anybody who hasn't yet arrived knows where they have to go. It's ironic that I was thinking only a few days ago that it had been weeks since I was on duty, and that I actually missed being the one who gives their thought for the day in the morning, and now here I am wishing the time would go faster so I can go to bed! Incidentally, my thought this morning can be viewed here and is well worth a watch if you've not already seen it! And if you have, then why not watch it again?


I've just noticed the loose, disconnected prose that this blog is becoming. Usually I write something down in my journal before posting it here, so it has time to be thought out a bit more and maybe edited slightly before making it out where literally tens of people will read it. Right now, however, I am pretty much free writing. Just fingers to keyboard, and if the brain gets in the way first with a thought then so much the better. I apologise, therefore, if this post is a little sloppier than some of my other ones. I will do a proper blog post soon, promise! Maybe after Mum and Dad have gone on Thursday...

Climbing and Schwingen from the rafters!

I did my first real rock climb on Tuesday- very rewarding! Jon Morgan and I did 6 pitches (apparently that means a rope length, about 50m) to the top of this rock and then 3 abseils down. It was quite tough, but it was fantastic to get to the top and look down at what we had come up! I'm not sure whether I prefer it to hiking, but I definitely hope to go again! Unfortunately, I'm not sure how much longer we will get to do exciting activities like that; the weather is due to close in any day now. Yesterday we had a fern, which is a strong and sometimes warm wind which howls down the valley (and makes all the flags wrap around the flagpoles in strange and incomprehensible ways, which is a real pain when you're in House, as I am today!) and after the fern we usually get either rain or snow. It's been cloudy ever since the fern, and apparently at the weekend it's due to get worse, so hiking may be off but who knows- skiing and sledging may well be on!

Work-wise it's been quite a good week; yesterday I was in grounds, splitting tree-trunks with Johan and Sam, and refilling the sauna's woodstore. In the wake of the tree-trunk splitting a man-points chart has been put up in the staff-room, to document all the manly (or unmanly) activities that go on amongst the staff. So far Pol has lost points for bullying a girl, and Kyle has gained points for a fart. It's a promising start, to  be sure. Today is House, which is quite fun despite the flags of doom- quite a few check-ins to do, and I managed to have a great session cleaning bathrooms listening to Pete Tong on the essential mix from 2002 (look it up, it's a fantastic track!) Alas, on the PR front progress on the blog remains slow. However, now that Pol is back off holiday I can hopefully learn to use the Mac's editing software (unfortunately Windows Movie Maker just doesn't cut the mustard for what I want to do!). It is a shame, since I have always tried to avoid Mac on the grounds that I don't like them, but then sometimes we just have to man up and get on with life!

On Tuesday, in addition to climbing, the whole staff team went out to learn how to do Schwingen, which is a Swiss wrestling style invented by farmers. The rules  of this sport which is woefully underplayed in the UK are fairly simple; you play in a ring with sawdust on the floor, and each combatant wears special shorts with a leather belt. Each opponent has one hand on their opponents belt at the back of the shorts, and another on their leg, and the idea is to get your opponent onto their back. We had a blast, and some of us weren't even that bad at it! I came away with a bruised toe, crushed finger, and aches which are only now showing on Friday (though some of that might be from the manly log-splittng which we were doing).

I don't know what I'm doing after lunch, but I'm going to leave now so that I can relax a bit before getting back to work!

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!

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!

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!