WRITTEN TRANSCRIPTION OF THE PODCAST:

Hello and welcome to my podcast My Life and Other Funny Stories. My name is Dagmar Tomášková, I am an English tutor and coach and I created this podcast for students at intermediate and upper intermediate levels who want to get better in their oral comprehension. As always you can find the transcription of this episode, comprehension quiz, and vocabulary list in the notes of the podcast.

Last time I talked about my search for a job in Iceland and our journey there. Today I will talk about our daily life and work.

I don’t know if I said it but we got the job as housekeepers, which means that we were cleaning hotel rooms and hostel rooms. The first day of our job was, of course, introductory. We were shown where to find things, how to clean everything, and so on.

In the morning you got the list of rooms that you were supposed to clean. Sometimes they were hotel rooms, sometimes you cleaned the hostels and sometimes you cleaned the campsite. It really wasn’t anything complicated – cleaning bathrooms, changing sheets, polishing mirrors. You didn’t even have to wear special attire to work (special attire means special clothes), you could just wear whatever you wanted.

To be honest, I was very surprised and pleased with the way of work there. When I compare it with Scotland, it was actually very nice. In Scotland, everything had to be quick and you couldn’t sit down for even a minute. The first two weeks in Scotland were very confusing and it was hard to get used to everything.

But in Iceland, the pace of the work didn’t need to be as rushed as it had to be in Scotland. You could work at your own pace and you would still finish on time.

Unfortunately for my boyfriend, I work very fast and want everything to be perfect. I also cannot sit down for a longer period of time without doing anything. Because then I feel like the time is going very slowly. So every time we were finished with our assigned work, I just went and cleaned something else or I asked our boss what to do.

For me, it was always better to spend my work hours working than just sitting down because we were finished. My boyfriend was sometimes quite annoyed, and I think that a lot of you would be too since I never let him sit for a long time and usually, I was encouraging him to work a little faster.

To encourage someone to do something is to make someone more likely to do something.

I can almost see all your eyes rolling in your eyeballs but that is just the way I am.

I also liked this work because it was a huge change from everything I was used to. I was used to sitting at a table, working on my computer until my brain was a big mush. A mush is a soft thick mass. But there it was the complete opposite. I didn’t have to think about anything, I just worked with my hands and I could listen to whatever I wanted to. I wish I was so passionate about french language back then because if I had been listening to French podcasts the whole summer, I would have improved so much. But I wasn’t listening to French podcasts. I was listening to a podcast called My Favorite Murder which is a podcast about murders. A murder is an act where one person kills another person. I listened to like 200 episodes. But I know I am not the only one who likes crime Stories, so I swear it’s not weird.

Or sometimes I was just listening to songs.

Housekeepers were always working from nine to five. This was the only downside of the work because if you work from 9 to 5 in Iceland you get the least money – don’t get me wrong, it’s still a lot. But if you work before nine or after five, you get extra money for every hour outside those regular business hours. Don’t get me wrong means „don’t understand it incorrectly“. But we almost never had that- only if we had over time which was not very common.

On a normal day, we came at 9, got our assignment, started to work, went to lunch, continued to work until 5 and then we were off.

It was actually perfect because, as I said in the last episode, especially during July, the sun in Iceland wasn’t setting until like three am. So in the evening, it looked like it was the middle of the day.

Imagine that it is 11 pm, and the sun is shining like it’s three pm in the afternoon. It was really hard to get used to it in the beginning. Because I wasn’t tired at all – my energy levels and my mood depends a lot on the light and the sun so if it was sunny, I just wasn’t tired.

You might be asking if it was difficult to fall asleep when the sun was shining so bright. And yes it was challenging to get used to the fact that it’s not dark outside when you go to sleep. But I tried to trick my mind into thinking that it was night by closing the blinds around 10 pm and turning on the lamp, pretending it’s dark outside. It worked because the blinds were very good- if you closed them, the room was dark. And so this way, my body believed that it was time to go to sleep.

But because of the light, we had plenty of time to go on some trips or just on walks after our work or we hung out with the other workers who slowly became our friends. Plenty of times means „a lot of time“ and „hang out“ with someone is to spend time with them.

On our days off, we usually went on some trips to see the waterfalls, the hills, the fjords, and so on. I have a few funny stories from some trips and maybe I will come back to them in another episode.

But as we were there to make money, we didn’t have that many days off. I think in August, we only had about three days off. In the beginning, it was very easy to go on walks, go on trips, work a lot, and sleep little. But as August came, the tiredness came as well, and on my days off I was just resting.

Sometimes I felt guilty that I didn’t go anywhere when I had my day off since Iceland is such a beautiful country and I wanted to see as much as possible while I was there. But my body is not a machine so I just had to let it rest.

Slowly the beginning of September approached and I was getting ready to go back home. My boyfriend stayed there for a week longer so I was leaving alone.

Before I left, I was lucky enough to see northern lights even though they were very weak and not as beautiful as they can be during winter. I hope that I will come back one day and see them in their full power. But still, I am grateful that I got to see them at least once.

When I was leaving, I felt very sad because I really was happy there. But I was also very excited to go back to work as an English tutor and start my full-time job. I wanted to come back the next year but this was this year and I didn’t go.

I just wasn’t ready to leave everything I was working on for the past year here and work manually again. Manually means with your hands.

Nevertheless, I hope that in the future, I will be able to come back for a few months and experience it again. Iceland is just another world- the people live a completely different way of life there than we do here in the Czech Republic and even though I wouldn’t be able to live like that for the rest of my whole life, I wouldn’t mind spending some part of my life this way.

So if you are thinking about working in another country, maybe just for one summer, I really recommend you try. It will show you new ways of life, it will bring new people and new experiences that you will that will benefit you for the rest of your life.

And if you are worried about your English, write me a message and I can help you with that. Shameless promotion. And while speaking of this,…

I started to post a lot of useful information on my Instagram such as how to write a good formal email, vocabulary for informal English, tips for traveling and learning language and there is a lot more to come. So if you are interested, definitely follow me on my account @dagmar_tomaskova – I will also link it to the notes.

Thank you so much for listening to this episode and don’t forget that you can find the transcription, vocabulary list, and comprehension quiz in the notes. Please give it a five-star rating if you liked it and…yeah that’s all, I completely lost my train of thought.

I will see you next time, bye-bye.