Working at a Japanese hotel

What followed where about 10 days of hard work, but also 10 very rewarding days. Basically, we were entering the busy holiday season in Japan, which meant Cafe Be was fully booked every day, basically.

The every day routines started at 7:30 on most mornings, when we prepared for the breakfast service (which runs from 8:00 to 10:00). My admittedly simple tasks include: saying "Ohayo Gozaimasu!" (good morning) to customers, followed by "Otamago o erande kudasai! Sukuramberu eggo desu ka, omeretto desu ka." (how would you like to have your eggs? Scrambled? Omelet?). In addition to this I was in charge of drinks (making sure there was coffee, ice coffee, juices available to customers). And clearing tables, doing the dishes, that sort of thing. Mathilde was pretty much doing the same as me plus delivering the omelets and scrambled eggs to customers (Captain was, probably rightly so, worried I might drop the deliveries on the customers)

Things then calmed down until the lunch, which starts pretty early in Japan - around 11:30. Here my tasks were similar, I was allowed to greet customers with a cheerful "Irasshaimase!", bring them the menu, and ask them whether they were having lunch. If the answer was yes, I was to then tell them that they could have coffee and ice coffee for free. And, as during the breakfast service, I had to keep the drink supply secured, as well as clearing tables, doing the dishes, and so forth... Lunch kind of dragged on until 15:30 or 16:00, the peak being from around 12:00 to 14:00. The hotel has a nice swimming pool that customers can use, which means they tend to hang around for longer.

Dinner starts around 18:00 and carries on until 21:00. There are less guests than for lunch, since basically mostly hotel guests have dinner, but the full board options include multi-course menus so things drag on...

After a couple of days, Captain also entrusted me to chauffeur customers from and to the train station. Probably my favorite job at Cafe Be ;-) I even took a couple of customers to visit the Kadowakizaki suspension bridge (that we'd visited at the beginning of our stay). And then, there were other odd jobs here and there like cleaning the swimming pool, cleaning rooms after customer checkout, that sort of thing.

All in all, it was pretty interesting to see how much work it really takes to run a hotel / restaurant. I Was impressed by how Captain and his crew (basically only his wife and one extra person apart from me and Mathilde and a young lad) kept the show running, and without anybody once raising their voice or showing any kind of stress (that's the Japanese working ethic for you!).

Of course, we had a lot of fun, too! My favorite bit was probably the dinners we had at the end of the meals. Never has a beer tasted as good as the one after the dinner service finished. And we were treated to some amazing food. Interestingly, Cafe Be serves international cuisine (steaks, pizza and pasta), whereas Captain and the others eat very traditional Japanese cuisine. Which was of course perfect for us. We were treated to all sorts of great stuff: tempura, sukiyaki, natto (fermented soya beans), sashimi and so forth, and so forth. Basically, every dinner was a treat!

Apart from the meals, there's other fun stuff going on as well. There's Naga-somen, where you basically drop somen noodles and bits of mandarin (mandarins are apparently a speciality of the Izu peninsula) down a bamboo gutter (with water flowing in it!), and people lined up around the gutter are supposed to catch the noodles and bits of mandarin with their chop sticks. I got the honor of managing the activity. And of course, this being Japan, there was a karaoke night too! And a BBQ night as well.

I suppose our Japanese improved as well - I certainly hope so. It's just that we've not yet reached a level where we can actually communicate properly in Japanese. I mean sure, we get our points across and usually understand what's asked of us,by a mixture of Japanese/English and sign language ;). And we are starting to get all those polite expressions pronounced quite naturally (there are a lot of expressions like that, used in quite specific situations - obviously we are only scratching the surface...)

So anyways, I guess that's an attempt at summarizing 10 rather hectic, but very rewarding, days at Cafe Be!