The day of my arrival, I had a hard time to find the right train station in Madrid to get to the small town where the hotel was. My active Spanish was limited to a few sentences, my Spanish listening abilities were even worse ... and no one around who spoke English or German! With help of a pencil and a sheet of paper, I finally found the right station, bought my ticket and got into the right train. I thought I had made it finally. A naive mistake as I should learn at the station. The hotel was about a kilometre up the hill, it was midnight, no one was around. Oh, great. Then I noticed a police car in front of the station's pub. My rescue!
I went in and asked one of the police officers if they could bring me to the hotel. Don't ask me how I managed to make clear what I wanted and why - I managed. They drove me up and saw me in to make sure I was really where I should be. Imagine my relief when the guy working at the front office greeted me in German! I was able to communicate without pen and paper again. He showed me to the flat the hotel had rented for short-time workers and explained on the way that another Spanish girl and two French guys were already living there. As he also spoke French, he introduced me to the boys. The Spanish girl was not home so the boys showed me around. My French was quite ok at that time and we actually managed to chat away the rest of the evening in a mixture of French and English.
The next morning, I woke up to find the Spanish girl asleep in the other bed in my room. So she was back. When she woke up some moments later, I got a big surprise. She actually spoke German quite well. She offered to show me around as she had a free day and I had to start the next day so we headed to the hotel for lunch - it was already past noon - and she introduced me to my colleagues at the front office. One of them reminded her of the fact that I needed to get used to Spanish but to my big relief she stayed with German for the rest of the day. We walked around the hotel and she told me much about its history and my colleagues. I had afternoon shift the next day so I was free to spend the evening with my room-mate and the two French guys.
My first days of work were hardest. It took some time to get used to Spanish again but one of my colleagues spoke English as well so he would switch to English whenever I stared blankly at him. With each day, my listening comprehension and active Spanish got better and after a week, I was allowed to do the check-ins of many customers on my own.
After two weeks, a customer entered the hotel and after greeting him, my colleague ushered me to do the check-in. I should have been warned by his smug smile ... the customer talked slowly but I had such a hard time understanding him that I apologised and asked my colleague for help. After the customer had gone, I told him that I just hadn't been able to understand his accent. My colleague burst with laughter and frankly told me that the customer had been speaking Portuguese all the time.
Some days later, we were together on morning shift. It ended at four pm so he asked if the other colleague and I wanted to have a few drinks together before dinner. Sure we did. As is customary in Spain, we went from pub to pub. As is also customary, the two guys alternately paid for me. They wouldn't know a word of me paying too. It was a fun afternoon. My only problem: While my two Spanish colleagues were drinking beer, I only drank coke because I was on medication and wasn't allowed to drink alcohol. Can you imagine how difficult it got to understand my tipsy colleagues whose Spanish became more and more slurred while I was still perfectly sober?
At the end of week three, I hit the roof. We had a woman working in the gift shop who was originally from France. That afternoon, I was chatting with her in her shop and one of the French guys entered. As he still didn't understand Spanish well, we switched to French. At least I thought that was what I had done. Instead, I noticed that she began to translate. I stared at her in surprise, then looked at the French guy who in turn stared at me, and she began to laugh and explained I had been speaking a mixture of French and Spanish. Honestly, I hadn't noticed! Of course, the poor guy hadn't understood what I was telling him.
Those four weeks in Spain have been a great experience but they accounted for quite some language confusion too. I wouldn't want to miss that time!
The hotel I worked in - yes, it was a real medieval castle!
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