Guest house management....

6/5/11

I rose at 6.30 to commence breakfast service for 15 people. The first hour is devoted to making the egg mixture, pancake mixture, shopping fruit for the fruit salad and preparing tomato, onions and garlic for the omelets. Peter stood back and let me get on with the work and there were no major disasters. After successfully completing breakfast peter pottered around for a bit, handed over the keys and his sim card, gave us the cash float and set off to Belgium. His parting words were have fun I doubt you will be busy!

3 hours later we were almost full. At one point we had guests queuing to select rooms. What happened to low season? Anyway we rose to the challenge and had a fab time checking people in, explaining how things works and welcoming guests.

7/5/11

Good god running a hostel is harder than it looks even with a house keeper who does the cleaning. There is so much to do,- breakfast, check out, check in shopping, bookings... That said breakfast went without a hitch but alas we ran out of food so a trip to the market was required. As a falang I can expect falang prices (essentially 1/3 to 1/2 more expensive) so I was re-leaved when Chenapa turned up halfway through breakfast and asked if I wanted to join her on a trip to the market. Chenapa is a Laos native who emigrated to the US so speaks fluently in both languages. So once we had finished breakfast and sorted things out we set off to the pussy market (not spelled this way but pronounced like pussy). We completed out trip successfully if not rather sweatily as it was hot.

Upon our return we all cooked lunch (essentially left overs from breakfast) and proceeded to make sangria for Chenipas party. The next time we looked up it was 4pm and walk in guests began to arrive again meaning we were almost full. As the day progressed we realized that running a guest house is not all that easy and James remarked that maybe we would need staff should we take this up full time!