Pickles

THE GOOD:

My comfy wumfy pants. OMGZ SO comfies!

Getting my groove back in the first German tutorial. This may have something to do with the abscene of the girls who are all OMG WE'VE ENTERED THE ROOM EVERYONE talky talky laugh-loudly-at-the-tutor's-jokes, oh-we-so-get-it-even-though-its-in-german, now lets whisper loudly to each other in german! (Hm. I need to work on my concise adjectives.) Anyway, one half of the said pair is actually lovely, and the other is not entirely awful, but it is nice to not hear the same cutesy voices every two seconds. Our tutorial is at 5 pm so the uni is nice and emptied and there are like six people in the class, plus we've got the sweet East-german tutor that I liked from last year. But to be honest, I enjoy feeling competent and loquacious again.

(But did I go too far in my excitement to share my associations with the word 'integration'? First, I offered something dramatic about how it used to be a positive, but now was seen as a negative, because people lost their own culture! Then, after a few simple entries by the others like 'language' and 'living together', in an attempt to not to seem too radical, I mentioned that if people of different cultures lived 'close' together without integrating, there could be 'violence'! The tutor murmured something about that being an extreme example.)

A break with unigirlfriend, signing up for a legal comp and talking about social stuff.

Brian offering his apologies for putting me on a back to back shift and offering to take over earlier on Wednesday evenings should I ever want him to.

Experimenting with going to bed with wet hair and a little product = waking up with nice nice curls.

THE BAD

Keep a non-paying former guest's passport as security, or give it to them because they need it to get paid? Would you pay back money owed for nights you slept somewhere for free, if you were just getting back on your feet and finally had nothing tying you there? What's to stop you taking the passport and walking away? What if you were annoyed about how you'd been treated there? I've got to say, if I was in that situation I'd put pretty high regard on looking after number one. Perhaps I'd mail the hostel a cheque for what I thought was fair, then never show my face around there again. Perhaps honour would win out and I would return the passport and promise the money soon. Perhaps the free breakfast given by the receptionist girls would keep me on their good side. Here's hoping, for my sake!

And then there's the woman who wants to go to Kangaroo Island, who finally gets the last place on the second-best tour and is waiting promptly for her tour bus in the morning, who waits forty minutes before coming back to the hostel. The bus driver who misses her on the list but comes back just as she's gone and calls (leaving no number, so I have to wait til the office is open twenty minutes later to contact anyone) to say he can't wait any longer and has to go. Too late to catch a taxi, no chance to book another tour. I actually felt sorry for him too, after giving him an earful of my (rightful) disapproval, because he obviously took his boo boo to heart. And then I had: "Sticky situation! I'll give you a sticky situation!" in an American Parent-Trap accent continuously refraining in my head.

THE UGLY

Call it office politics, suspected theft, a testosterone war, 'no trust', the IT boy claiming too much authority, a tendency to 'annoy' staff behind the front desk, a tendency to 'help' staff behind the front desk, stepping out of the view of cameras, too much 'social acumen', a dirty set up. Morgan's been kicked out of the hostel and it sucks. For him, I would imagine, even more than for us, since we're talking about his home and family. Damn it.