That is what my colleague asked me one day. I sure hope she meant: "Are you bored all the time?"
It really can be boring during the work days. There isn't much that I do because I don't speak Chinese and if guests asks me about something in English, I usually don't know the answer. First weeks I tried to ask a lot of questions about the hotel work and about the things going on in the hotel, but often I didn't get answers. Maybe I wasn't understood or sometimes it seemed to be odd that I was asking about the things and tasks that weren't current at the time.
In one point I was quite depressed. I was feeling that I'm not learning a lot and I'm just wasting my and everyone other's time here. It's the boredom in the work and the fact that I didn't have much to do outside the work either. Usually at the evenings I was quite tired after nine hours of pretending to work. Then I just call my husband at home and maybe visit a supermarket to get some drinking water. On my day off it was raining heavily so I just stayed at the hotel. I think that was a mistake and I should have gone some place new even though it was raining.
In one point I had to consciously remind me several times a day that the feeling that I'm good-for-nothing and useless, is just a feeling and result of current circumstances.
I think last Thursday was the worst day ever. On Wednesday we had a Spring Outing and we visited a tourist area in Wuxi. I had high expectations that it would be a nice change to the boring days at hotel. It was a change but the day didn't go well for me so it was a huge disappointment. I will write something about the trip in another post.
So last Thursday was the worst and it could be seen from me. One of my co-worker consoled me: "When you are back in Finland, you just put this everything behind you." and it wasn't even some translation error. He really meant to say that.
Luckily I had three days off starting from Friday and my husband arrived to visit me for two weeks. We visited Suzhou and some places near the hotel. I got my mind of the boredom at the hotel and got some new ideas what to do at work. On monday I started working on a new info map for foreign guests and it seems that there is some big international conference in the hotel so more guests that I can serve and I’ve been able to speak Russian with some guests.