First Day of Work!

After another trip to Mission Bay and a lovelly stroll back into town yesterday, I finally changed and headed off to my "trial" work shift at The Ponsonby. Oh, but before that Beate and I had taken the link bus just up the hill because we were done walking and we were almost to our stop when crash! The bus totally rammed into some gal's car door!!! She was sooooo pissed!! And the bus driver was like, you saw me coming so you shouldn't have opened your door. It was hilarious!

I get to work at 4pm and the Manager, Hardi (I think he's Japanese), was talking to me and then he had Paul, one of the guys that worked there, show me around. After showing me around for about an hour he gave me a bunch of paperwork and a little manual to read. He wanted to me to have the contract and everything signed today, but I didn't have enough time to read everything yet. But it's okay, because I have a few days until it has to be turned in. Then it was funny because he asked if I wanted to go home and look at the contract or start working. I was like, I'm already here and in the uniform so the best way for me to decide on the job would be to work! Plus I had already planned on it. I worked until 9pm and pretty much did the job. There wasn't any "Watch what Mark is doing" B.S.--it was like hey, Lisa! Table 44 needs to order, etc. It was definitely fun and every table I served asked where I was from. The only real problems I had were with some of the words of the specials; a lot of food here has a different name than in the U.S. And I only spilt a tiny bit of a beer on my shirt (as usual) so that was pretty good!

Hardi asked if I could come back tomorrow at noon and I said of course! What else do I have to do? Haha. So I just got done working the first part of a split shift from noon to 3pm and then I go back at 5. I'm not really sure when I get done tonight though...the Kiwi's operate on a 24hour clock so I'm totally confused all the time. But right now I'm just one of the wait staff and once I get the hang of it then they want to train me in the bar so I can do everything. The company that owns these bars is called Frenzi Group and get this: If I'm with them at least 3 months or so they will pay for me to get 24 credits towards a hospitality degree! Ha! I guess this means I could eventually have another degree...sweet! Here's the website of the cafe if you guys want to check it out:

http://www.theponsonby.co.nz/

It looks like I'm not working tomorrow, but I am on Saturday and Sunday so I can probably go sailing (and get comfortable shoes with a rubber sole) tomorrow! Tony called me today so I told him to call me tomorrow and I might be able to go. The weather is absolutely beautiful today and was yesterday, which is good for the bar because good weather = people going out. That's what they tell me here in Auckland! And...I've received a lot of good feedback/compliments from Hardi, Wiki (the girl manager that I worked with today), and Riat (or something like that--he's the head chef and he's from Bali). Wiki told me that it's rare that Riat says good things about the new people so I'm lucky!

So things are going great here in Auckland and I think that I'm really going to like this job!

-Lisa