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I think I'm starting to get the hang of the job. Today went well enough, at least. Heh.
I think I've got to work on my language skills, though. A Russian couple came in today with next to no English, and my Russian is genuinely nonexistant. We managed to get the important parts (prices and hours) done in English, but I had to hurriedly google a russian phrasebook so that I could at least see them off afterwards with a 'do svidaniya'. So then I spent the free bits of the afternoon working on basic greetings - just a small index card apiece with 'hello' and 'goodbye' and 'I don't speak ~language~' and 'thank you' and 'excuse me' and 'I'm sorry' - in the major tourist languages we get through here. French, German, Spanish, Italian, Dutch, Russian, then Japanese, Korean and Chinese (which is tonal and I'm tone deaf, so possibly I ought not attempt that one).
The only one of those I could actually carry off most of the needed conversation in is French, though I could maybe make a stab at it in German. And, um, my pronunciation on most of them is probably shite. I think you can get audio language tutorials, though? I just need the basic sound and flow so that when I say 'hello' I don't sound like a toilet unclogging or anything.
I'll learn just the greetings first, though. Learning the basic conversation in six or seven other languages will probably take me a bit longer -_-; It's just really hard to watch someone struggling and not be able to do anything about it, you know?
Of course, I've got to learn the tour first. I've spend the past two weeks learning 800 years worth of site history and trying to get it stapled into place in my head and in the right order. I probably won't have to actually lead a tour until next week or the week after. Which is perfectly fine by me, it's taken me this long to figure out which bits are correct given that I've been handed three separate sources and all of them differ in the details (my manager finally scrounged out the 'definitive' collected source for me today, which is annotated and backed up with references for the primary and secondary sources, so we're most of the way there now).
So. My homework for the rest of the week will be getting those greetings figured out, and then reading over the tour until I've got it mostly fixed in my head. I've only been here for three weeks, only two days a week, so I keep running into new problems and stuff I don't know yet. But I think I'm starting to get the hang of it now (*touches wood*).
Honestly, I thought I'd just be working reception, you know? Back at site one, I was on dish-washing duty mostly, this is kind of a change of pace -_-;
The only one of those I could actually carry off most of the needed conversation in is French, though I could maybe make a stab at it in German. And, um, my pronunciation on most of them is probably shite. I think you can get audio language tutorials, though? I just need the basic sound and flow so that when I say 'hello' I don't sound like a toilet unclogging or anything.
I'll learn just the greetings first, though. Learning the basic conversation in six or seven other languages will probably take me a bit longer -_-; It's just really hard to watch someone struggling and not be able to do anything about it, you know?
Of course, I've got to learn the tour first. I've spend the past two weeks learning 800 years worth of site history and trying to get it stapled into place in my head and in the right order. I probably won't have to actually lead a tour until next week or the week after. Which is perfectly fine by me, it's taken me this long to figure out which bits are correct given that I've been handed three separate sources and all of them differ in the details (my manager finally scrounged out the 'definitive' collected source for me today, which is annotated and backed up with references for the primary and secondary sources, so we're most of the way there now).
So. My homework for the rest of the week will be getting those greetings figured out, and then reading over the tour until I've got it mostly fixed in my head. I've only been here for three weeks, only two days a week, so I keep running into new problems and stuff I don't know yet. But I think I'm starting to get the hang of it now (*touches wood*).
Honestly, I thought I'd just be working reception, you know? Back at site one, I was on dish-washing duty mostly, this is kind of a change of pace -_-;
