Category Archives: Learning Diaries

First day at the office!

Learning Diaries,

19.2.2018

Yesterday was my first day and I am delighted. I would like to spend free time here, but look forward to more than everyday life, or is it a paradise for everyday life? If I was on vacation here, I would lie on the beach all the time. Instead of holiday, now I work on the beach so I’m wondering is this really true or am I dreaming?

 

Dreams can and must be. In the past I thought that dreams are dreams and they can be dreamed of, but they never meet the reality. But now it feels like living a dream, although I would have never thought that I would end up in the Caribbean, and besides everything, into a surfing school. It feels like this is not true, although it is a little bit too much to start believing that it is true. In my apartment I write a blog and see how the palm trees swing in the wind on my balcony, this is the unrepeatable beauty.

 

The first working day started with a little bit of confusion. I got tasks that I was not immediately aware of, a little time lost, panic and pressure while I tried to assemble myself. As I was a student working for the first day, I could not automatically complete everything. Besides, in Finland we are doing things in a bit different way. For a while I pulled myself back together and thought I’d swallow Annika’s pride and try to know but knowing nothing.

The girl who is working on the side of the restaurant came to tell me not to worry and she encouraged me to do my job well and with dignity. On her first day, she told she was crying. I thought in my mind what soup I put myself in? After a while, I began to understand what I was supposed to do and I worked and in the end of the day my boss came to me with an encouraging feedback.

So this is how my first day at work went and everything ended well. Eight hours went by and I learned a lot, made price comparisons from other companies and invented new product ideas. On days when we do not teach surfing, we offer our customers trips for snorkeling, riding, rock climbing and everything possible.

My first day of work was good and I even continued working at home and wrote a blog. My brain hardly ever had to think so much, HAH: D

All the best to you, my beloved Finland, I write after I have slightly beacon lived this dream more

P.S. I give the boss Finland present  Sibelius cd, Iittala candle cups, chocolate and Finnish flag and of course GRADIA fabric bag

Buenas noches!

Learning Diaries,

 

 

The last week start here far from home. This week we have experienced an earthquake and somebody stole my rental bike.

Winter is coming to Spain and night the temperature drops to under ten degrees. It saw in the street view that people dress in thin winter jackets and longsleeved pants. The beach are empty. During the day the temperature rises over 20 degrees.

The work has the same for all these eight weeks that we have been here.

Couble shifts left and we can go to homewith one new experience 🙂

– Sari & Mari –

 

Buenas dias!

Learning Diaries,

Last week I forgot to write a blog post, sorry!

We have been so busy at work. Sari has been working in TorreMarket also, because they have only few workers there. I have had lots of work in the office. A new employee came to the office and she has been trained by follow us…

Work is same as usually: booking greenfeetimes, flying tickets and rental cars for customers, makeing travel programs, customer service, answering the phone…

Mari went to the football game in Murcia last week. That was Spanish culture at its best!

Real Murcia vs FC Barcelona 0-3

Mari y Sari

Buenas días :)

Learning Diaries,

Five weeks behind. Four weeks and we are home.

This week we have done the same works as before and found that we have already learned to do much without the help of others. Good for us!

The first good thunderous air hit a day and the next night there was a lot of rain. But yes, the air was fresh after rain.

Both had a weekend free so yesterday we headed to the local market place which is organized every saturday on a street. There were a lots of people, lots of sellers and the air was warm, 27 degrees.

Today was supposed to be a beach day but wins so much that we decided to do some school works…

Bueno para la pròxima semana 🙂

Sari y Mari

 

Torrevieja

Learning Diaries,

Half the time behind here. Last few weeks has been heavy. There have been illness, visits to the hospital and moveing to a clean apartment. All this has been hard and blog writeing has left lesser. Now life smiles again! We have nice apartment and now we have swimmingpool also!

At work we have had busy. Our office moved new place and past week we had to work two different offices which caused its own problems. Two people do same work, different place and one phone!

At freetime we have been at the apartment, swim a lot, sleep and eat well 🙂

Mari y Sari

Here is our swimmingpool 🙂

Here is Enrike. He started the same day as we did, but he was only one month.

Our new apartment!

Hola

Learning Diaries,

Now is the first week behind at ProJenni Travels in Torrevieja, Espanja.

We have learned to book teetimes, rent a car and buy flyftickets to our customers. We have office in the same businesspremises with Cafe Ella and Torremarket. She owns all off these. At work she have employer many countrys and every day we heard Spanish, Finnish and English for example. Because our customers coming for example the Finland, Sweden, Germany, so this confuses our heads.

Sari taught the spanishchef how to bake a finnish salty- and sweetpies, without a common language. They spoke with a sign. But result was very good.

Weather is good, the tempeature is 25-30 celsius. Fortunately our apartment is 300 meters away to the sea.

Dining out is cheap. Sometimes we didn’t know what we order, everything has been good.

Sari y Mari

         

Coutances calling

Learning Diaries,

Hello!
Almost two weeks have passed. There has been some new jobs: I have been working at the potting machine and planting seedling for the early spring market, and watering plants in the tunnels and in the shop. I have become pretty independent in my tasks, which is nice.
This place is a school. There are students of different ages and levels starting from youngsters of the third grade in high school (it takes 4 years in France) and those at the basic level of the professional college to young adults doing a two year extra course after the basic education. I have had the opportunity to work also with various classes doing different jobs under the supervision of their teachers. It has been very interesting to follow the teaching, and the students working. One time, for instance, the teacher explained the principles of watering and showed very precisely how it should be done. And then every student had a little parcel to water, and everybody followed attentively. It was interesting for me too to watch and learn!
As an extra treat, I have had the opportunity to take part at two floristry lessons. We made vertical arrangements in a sponge with three different dahlia-flowers: one big, three medium-sized and five small ones. The principles were, of course, but the working was very different. Where we, there back home, are given very free hands to create our own vision of the work in hand, here we had to follow instructions very stricktly. The aim was to produce ten or twelve exactly similar arrangements, only changing the choice of flowers used. We didn’t, of course, quite succeed It was really interesting and nice, and it was, actually, quite a difficult task to choose the flowers among 300 different varieties so that they would match nicely together and behave like wanted in the arrangement.
Tomorrow I’ll be off with the extra course students to visit the Ernest Turc enterprise, a big producer of different kinds of plant material, at least seeds and bulbs. They have, for instance, created the dahlia Normandie.

Torrevieja, Spain

Learning Diaries, Training Places,

Hola!

Today was our first day in the office! Our job counselor is Johanna, who has come to work to projennis in the spring. Office is very small and it was difficult to move and work there, but fortunetaly the office will move to new premises within a few weeks.

Today we just get some information how to work and what we have to do. We allso use email to ask some free greefee times and send emails to customers. Mari allso wash several golf clubs :).

Tomorrow we stady how to rent a car. But now we have free time and we are going to eat some pasta and swim in the sea.

Mari y Sari

This is taken near Torrevieja marina

First week in Coutances

Learning Diaries,

My first week in Coutances is behind. In the begining I was exhausted in the evenigs, after dinner. I guess it’s because there was everyday so many new things to learn and people to meet. Now I feel like I had stayed here for ever!

I have been working in the greenhouses and in the dahlia field. I have been picking strawberries in one tunnel and collecting Alstroemeria flowers in an otherone. I spend one and a half days cleaning the strawberry plants. There were quite a lot of fungus spreading there, so I tried to do the job properly.

Alstroemerias are nice. They grow in the real soil in a tunnel, and the oldest ones have been there for over twenty years. Only the very tall ones are collected. Small ones and the ones having only a few flowers are thrown away. My heart is crying! But I understood it better when I got some of the not so good ones to decorate my room, It wasn.t easy at all to arrange them nicely.

I have also arranged things in the shop of the greenhouse: organising plants nicely, writing name and price tags, cleaning faded flowers.

And then, of course, I have been a little in the dahlia field. It is quite a big area full of dahlias. All the different colours, all the different shapes. It is amazing! And all of it has been organised, planted and taken care of with students of the school. The Dahlia Festival was opened on Saturday afternoon. At the same time a new variety of dahlia was launched and baptised: it is called Normandie, and it is brilliant, pale yellow, like the famous cream and butter of Normandy.

Next time I will try to add some photos. For the moment, it has been enough to find out about the wifi, to be able to post anything at all.