the Pegasus

Today was a bad day. I moved to the Pegasus last night and agreed to work for them. (4 hours a day, which means that if my pay is the price of the room, I'm making slightly less than €2.50 an hour. um... at least it's tax-free?)

They stuck me in a room two building-sections away from the reception. That meant that I had to go past some renovation work, which involved the heat being off, the door to the outside being open, and the door that enabled me to go back to the reception and common areas occasionally being LOCKED. In which case, no problem, just go up two stories and that floor is connected to the reception. Gah! The corridor, and, more importantly, the bathroom, were totally unheated. Which meant that it was kind of like camping. In the winter. In Berlin.

This morning, the shower was warm. Not hot. I didn't have time to eat breakfast, I forgot my wallet and transportation pass (so I wouldn't even have money to pay the fine if I got caught), and I missed the bus... because I was standing on the wrong side of the street. I got to class late. And there was NO COFFEE. And to make matters worse, I had to skip the second half of the class to meet with my boss, who KNOWS I have class until 1.

After that, things looked up. I changed rooms to one that gets up to the balmy temperature of 68 degrees, I can surf the web while I work, and my boss will even let me organize the kitchen as work. I'm doing translation, which is cooler than I thought. Sometimes I just clean up bad English, and other times I translate from German and French into English or Spanish. The coolest thing was the sign about labeling your food. In each language it said to write something different- name, room number, expiration date, or date of departure. Actually, all they care about is date of departure. So I changed all the languages.

Actually, I think what I really don't like about this hostel is that I keep having rooms to myself. Bo-ring! Last night at about 11 a cute German boy checked into my room and I thought he said he was staying for a year. Turns out, he was only staying for one night... he stayed a year back in 2003. Oh well. I'm sure that all too soon I'll have roommates.