Introduction

Dierhag…what? Is that a bird, is that a word, is that German? To be perfectly honest, I could say that about most of the stuff that flies around at the housekeeping coffee table, deep down in the basement of hotel Fischland.

Hold on. First this Dierhagenisch monster of a word, and now something fishy about basements. Right. How did I end up sitting confused in a hotel basement in the first place? To begin with, let’s just say it’s not the first time. I have been in the hotel housekeeping business for the past couple of summers and it seems that there is a tendency to shove the kindly housekeepers in the dark basements and out of sight. This summer I wanted to do something different. Break out of the box. Break the box. After a fair chunk of time brushing up my language proficiency, googling, perfecting resumes and firing off summer job applications, I succeeded. 

So now I sit in a German basement occupied by a bunch of housekeeping ladies. 

Maybe not as grand as you were hoping for, but it’s still enough to confuse me. To make me feel giddy. To make me feel uncomfortable. To make feel both out of place and at the right place. 

I’m about to ditch this talk about feelings for moment and set the record straight. For the summer of 2013, I, Mika Tompuri, work in the housekeeping department of Strandhotel Fischland, a fairly big German hotel by the Baltic Sea. The four-star superior holiday resort is conveniently located in the North-German seaside landscape dotted by small idyllic villages, which seem to exist only for the summer. To breathe summer and gently to shake tourists out of their holiday money, and make a run for it when the seasons change. In all honesty, that sounds awfully lot like what I’m doing here - except that my lungs aren’t all that big, I only get tiny trickles of the currency flow, and I don’t run all that fast. 

Finally, I know it’s already nearing the end of June and that it has taken me a while to get this small writing project started. And I know there are tons of exciting blogs about clothes and cats out there, but I thought it’d be nice to have place to collect and organize my thoughts. And, let’s not lie, it’d be even nicer if there was someone out there to listen to my ramblings. So friends, welcome to this journey through a summer in Germany. 

So, was this Dierhagenisch monster actually a bird or a word?

And yes, I intend to end my first post with such a cheap way of building up suspense.