The year before I went to uni I decided to do a ski season in Morzine (France), in order to 1) have fun and 2) develop my french language skills. Two of my school friends decided to come with me as I knew the people i was going to work for so it was easy for me to get them a job as well.
When we go there we were surprised to find out that we weren’t actually staying within Morzine but a 15 minute drive away, our employers also said we weren’t able to walk in to town as it was too dangerous to walk on the roads. This was really annoying as it meant in order to go to the pub we had to get a €15-25 taxi each way, which made things expensive before we even bought a €6 pint. Due to poor snow conditions we weren’t able to start work right away and were sat around in this house not doing a lot for a few weeks. During this time we weren’t getting paid and the other people in the house were getting annoyed as all the money they had saved to bring out was dwindling rapidly. Once we finally started work we thought it would be plain sailing from there, but it was much worse than be had expected. The senior staff (the restaurant owners) were generally rude and extremely unforgiving. They would ask you a question, which I thought required an answer, but if i replied they would scream at me for answering back. However I ploughed on and continued to work hard as it was the best thing for my language skills (also if we left we wouldn’t get our tips, which were stored until the end). Due to the fact that one waiter broke their wrist and one just left I was the only waiter left, this meant I had 5 weeks (Monday -Sunday) in a row without a day off. This was the most challenging part of the whole experience as not only did I do day shifts, but also the evening shifts as well that went on until 2 AM. At one point my girlfriend of the time came out from England to see me for a day and I was only able to see her for 2 hours before I had to go back to work.
During the season our bosses had said that due to the fact that I had barely got any skiing in, I would be able to stay after they closed for a couple weeks to ski in the surrounding areas. However they later retracted that and told us to leave. This was the cherry on top of the worst season I could have hoped for, but the silver lining was that, because I couldn’t really go out (as I was working every day) I managed to save some money which I spent on a language course in France, which was sick.
