hilarious

today I was chalet bashing with a young Slovakian girl who otherwise works as an au pair for my friends. She speaks good English, but still needs to get to grips with nuance and colloquialisms. So she's off to college to learn our language properly. In the meantime, she is chalet bashing with me, as we both need the cash…and today was SO funny. We had 8 chalets to clean, so started out with the customary speed, packing up all the laundry into bags whilst the loafers in the chalets got ready to check out at 10.00.

We drive all over the site in golf buggies. They are quite basic - accelerator, brake. Backwards, forwards. To take the brake off, you simply stomp the accelerator. And that's what happened…we parked the buggy, leapt out to clean the first chalet, and my Crazy Slovak Friend brought a bag of laundry off the buggy. I told her we already had one in the chalet [one we prepared earlier]. So she chucked the bag back on the stationary buggy…and it shot off up the road!! The bag [about 10 kilos] landed on the accelerator, and off it went! The Crazy Slovak was running in front of it, thinking to stop it that way - I was running at the side hoping to leap in and stamp the brake, then along came Andy [who has the longest legs here] and shoved me aside, leapt into the buggy and stamped on the brake.

Relief! And total hysteria - I so wish we had a video of THAT little incident. Laughed for ages. Heh heh.

After that the day just got silly - we had so many chalets to clean it was dizzying. So at 12.30 we decided to stop for lunch with Julie. Nattering away outside on the veranda, the next thing I knew, I'd been stung IN THE ARMPIT by a blasted wasp!! Oh my word - that hurt!! I almost knocked poor Julie for six trying to get her to rip the little beast OFF me…the Crazy Slovak did that, and Julie slapped a load of vinegar on it. That was quite a relief. Then we waited. Last time I had a Bee sting I had one of those weird 'I can't breathe' episodes. But this time there was just lots of pain [still is! silly creature] and I was fine. But it jolly well hurts!

All things come in threes and the final small chaos was the Crazy Slovak smacking her head so hard into a door that I heard it at the front of the chalet! We were so exhausted by 4.00 that we didn't know  whether we were coming or going, and all we could think about was GOING! And finally we did. Uff. What a day!! 7 hours of constant motion…

I spent an hour in the bath getting all the grime of today off me - I am now about to have a lovely COLD glass of Pinot…phew…