Hi Everyone,
I’m Juley, for those who don’t know me (and for those who do) I’m a Hungarian girl doing a BA in French and Spanish and I’m currently spending my summer working in France before heading off to my year abroad in Mexico.
It’s been a month since I embarked on my French adventure working in sunny Saint Jean de Monts and I’m here to share my experiences with you all. I’m working as a receptionist intern for 2,5 months in a summer residence where we rent out big and beautiful houses with private swimming pools to our clients. Since it’s been a month already, (and I’ve been horribly lazy as well as busy, which is why I ended up with no blog entries so far) I will try and start from the beginning and reflect on my initial perceptions.
So, I landed in Nantes on the 16th June and my journey on the land of cheese and wine had begun. From Nantes I had to take a bus from the airport to the train station, get the train to Challans and from there catch a bus to St Jean. It was all very carefully planned, I knew where to catch what, times, prices, everything. And then I found out that there was a strike at the SNCF (not unusual at all in France as we know) so most of the trains had been cancelled. I was standing there with my 40 kg of luggage and strangely enough didn’t panic! As it revealed there was a coach that replaced the train that went to St Gilles Croix de Vie (a neighbouring town to St Jean) so I hopped on that one and after a 2.5 hour-long journey I arrived to St Gilles where my future colleague, Joy picked me up and took me home.
I’m living in another residence run by the company with a British girl, Fiona, who’s doing the same degree as me but in Leeds, a British guy, Steve, who’s working as a technician and initially there was another British girl, Beth, who also read French and Spanish but she finished her internship at the end of June. Our house is quite small and for 2 weeks, 3 of us girls were sharing one bedroom, which was pretty cramped and since I was the new girl, I had to sleep on the floor on a mattress. But since Beth has left, it’s just 3 of us in the house so everyone has a bit more living space. After my student house in England I was shocked to be faced with a lack of kitchen utensils such as a measuring cup and a chopping board!! Not to mention that we had no oven. The situation has improved since the beginning since we took an oven (of a size of a microwave) from the stock of the residence along with a chopping board.
After I arrived I had about 3 days off before I started work. Much to my pleasant surprise, there happened to be a Pride in Nantes so I got on the coach again and rolled back to the prefecture of the region. It was rather courageous of me since I didn’t know anyone there and I’m not exactly the most spontaneous or easy-going person. I had talked to a French girl on Facebook who also didn’t have anyone to go with so I teamed up with her and a group of other random French women. It was an incredible experience, I had never been part of anything like it, it was a huge party and a lot of fun. It was also great to be part of a real French event.
There were soo many people!
Nantes as a city is also amazing I can see myself living there. It’s big enough to give you a bubbly city life kind of feeling, yet small enough to have a pleasant atmosphere where people are nice and look out for each other, unlike in a big capital like Paris where people are known to be individualists (and kind of stuck up as French people from other parts of France reckon haha)
Japanese style garden in Nantes
Château des ducs de Bretagne – The French like their castles!
Following my little getaway to Nantes I started work on Monday. The amount of information that was thrown at me was shocking. I would have never thought how many different tasks being a receptionist involves….and I’m not even a full time receptionist, only a stagiaire!! Let me give you a short recap of how it all works. As I’ve mentioned at the beginning, the main idea is that our residence rents out houses to people. I’m mostly working with Joy, a Philippine girl who is the main receptionist. She is adorable I’ve got along with her from the beginning. We have two technicians at the residence, my housemate Steve and Jérome. We have a gouvernante (a head housekeeper according to wordreference), Brigitte, whose job is to make sure that the houses are clean when the clients arrive and she arranges everything that is to do with cleaning (except for actually doing the cleaning because we have cleaners to do that….but she makes the beds if the clients request it….confusing much?) and then we have our manager, Angele. It would take long to explain what we actually do, but basically we need to deal with clients’ requests, if they complain about something, we need to inform the technicians/the gouvernante/the manager/the pool guy, we do check-ins and check-outs, answer the phone (something that was very daunting for me for a few weeks, I’m much better at it now but still slightly insecure), order bakery, manage résalys, a fairly complex hospitality program that we use, reply to emails…etc etc.
It was really difficult at the beginning because at work I didn’t understand a whole bunch of vocabulary relating to different utensils in the house and the security systems for the pool and so on. It was also quite challenging to constantly having to switch between English and French, no Hungarian clients so far….surprise surprise haha. I feel like I’ve improved a lot since the beginning in terms of language skills, confidence and initiative so I’m really happy.
I still have a lot of catching up to do but I feel like this post is sufficiently long enough so I will say à la prochaine, les amis!