Hannah hörburger
You wonder what a day at “Little India” looks like? I’m going to tell you! “Little India” is one of the multiple shops at Aalborg Street Food and, as you might have guessed, serves Indian cuisine. There is no specific time when work starts. They divide the day into different shifts and use an app called smartplan which shows you exactly who has to work when, with whom and for how long. The tasks depend on which shift you have. In the morning, at around 8.00, you start to prepare food for the whole day. Even though “Little India” only offers six different dishes, they are all quite similar. There are lots of different assignments to complete like cooking rice, making the different sauces, cutting vegetables and of course, a lot of chicken. From 11.30, when Aalborg Street Food opens, till 21.30 you have to take the orders, arrange the dishes, clean the kitchen whenever there’s time and give out some taste samples, preferably in Danish. “Vil du have en smagsprøve?” which means “Do you want to taste?” is a phrase I remember even though I am back in Austria. Even though the last shift ends at 21.30, I often had to stay longer, sometimes until 23.00 to clean the whole kitchen and shut everything down. In the beginning standing on my feet for a whole day was very hard for me and I often got back pain, but after a short time I got used to it. It only took me five minutes to get to work by bike and we always got the weekends off. Besides, if we had a request/wish regarding the work schedule, they always tried their best to adapt to it. Generally, our boss was nice to us all time and really cared about us, as well as all the other employees and the manager. They helped us whenever it was needed, explained new tasks patiently and accepted mistakes. We also got something to eat when we were working, for which I am very grateful, but even though the meals were delicious, after two weeks I had more than enough of it. I definitely learned how to prepare chicken right, however, being vegetarian, unfortunately, this is of little use to. Nevertheless, I realized that working in a kitchen is not for me, because I didn’t really like the daily-tasks and the stress. Furthermore, I have kind of a personal problem with throwing away so much good (!) food as you need to do in a restaurant. All in all, I (more or less) enjoyed working there, even though it was not even close to being in a kindergarten, the place I actually wanted to work these four weeks. |