Advent Calendar for the hostel

I've lived in hostels for a few years now and I usually don't make it home to my parents for Christmas because I am busy working at the Christmas market here in Edinburgh. However things are different this year and I have a lot of time on my hands. I am still not going home for Christmas because the plain tickets cost more than I can afford. So I am using my time, doing all the things I didn't have time for the last couple of years: baking biscuits, decorating the tree, drinking mulled wine and making decorations for the hostel. 

One thing I already wanted to do last year but didn't have the time for was crocheting an Advent Calendar. In case you are from a country where they are not very common: they have 24 bags or doors, one for each day from 1st to 24th December and are meant to make the time until Christmas a little sweeter for children. They are a big thing in Germany and I don't know a single child in Germany that doesn't have one. Even nurseries have one where every child gets their turn to open one door or bag or parcel. Over here in the UK the simple ones with wee doors behind which you find a bit of chocolate are the norm and I think most kids here have one of those as well. 

When I was a child however most kids I knew also had one that the parents or grandparents would fill for them with little toys, sweets, chocolate, useful things for school or the child's latest obsession (in my case stamps from all over the world at some point). 

And so this year to show a little tradition from my home country but also to simply make it a little more Christmassy I am the one making an Advent Calendar for the (hostel)kids.

First I crocheted 24 little bags. Mine are all kinds of different sizes, since I used a lot of left over yarns and depending on their strength I had to adjust the number of stitches in the bottom row. There are little gaps in the second row from the top for a string so I can close the bags and attach them to the fire place. Since it is really close to 1st December and you might not have enough time to crochet 24 bags, You could also use felt instead, because it's really easy to work with and saw together. 

Then I got really thin craft foam sheets and used a biscuit cutter as a stencil. The advantage with those is that they leave a clear imprint on the foam but you don't have ugly marker stains on your stars and even, if you screw things up a little when you write the numbers on the stars you can just turn them around and trz again. With the stencil the stars don't have a "bad side".

With a simple black marker I wrote the numbers on the stars and glued those with regular liquid glue to the little bags. 

And I used simple ribbon for wrapping presents as sting to close the bags. It is cheap and looks festive. I am sure you all know the trick to make it curly, don't you? 

This is what the finished bags look like. 

And here they all are. I also crocheted a band to hold all the bags. That way I don't have to use thump tags for every single bag. Instead I tied them with the ribbon to the band. They are not in order which makes the search for the right bag a little more exciting. 

Molly is already looking forward to 1st December, when we open the first bag. 

Oh what a night

When the kids asked me  earlier on, if I wanted to make this story into a blog post I declined. But that was before the encore...

As a night porter it is my job to kick everyone out at 11 pm who doesn't stay here, as in guests' friends or former longtermers visiting their old pals. But it also means that I have to try to keep people from sneaking into the hostel, thinking they could crash here for free or hook up with their latest pub/club conquest.

There are several reasons for this. The biggest reason is simply health and safety. Every guest has to sign into a book, so we can keep track of, who is here and which bed they are in. In case there should ever be a fire we can easily track who made it out and who didn't. Sounds horrible, I know. And imagine that scenario and we had more bodies than people from our register missing. We'd be fucked!
Of course it also is just plain bold sneaking in and trying to get free accommodation. As hard as it sounds but we are trying to run a business here!

So tonight one of our guests came home with a girl. He has been staying here for a while so I new his face, but didn't recognize her so I asked her for her ticket (it's a little card that proves that they are staying here) and it turned out he had give her his ticket, trying to sneak her in. BUSTED! I told her, that she couldn't be here after 11 pm and that she had to leave. When she asked, if she could use the loo, I told her she could, but that if she wasn't out of the hostel in 10 minutes, I would come and find her and kick her out.

10 minutes went by and there was no trace of her, so I went looking. They weren't in his room or bed, there was no one in the fire exit, so the last possibility was the bathroom. This hostel doesn't have many places you could hide in. Sure enough when I entered the boys bathroom I heard voices out of one of the cubicles. I banged against the door, telling them that she had to get out of the hostel or I would call the cops. That threat works every time.

Of course she tried to make up all kinds of excuses why they were together in the cubicle in the boys' bathroom. Yep, I am sure all you guys did is talk.
On her way out of the hostel, she complained that this wasn't a nice hostel and so on. I am sorry, but if I tell you that you are not allowed to be here and that all you could do was pee and then get out, and you lock yourself in the bathroom with your new boytoy than NO, I am not fucking nice!

Some of my kids (that's what I call other longtermers) had heard what was going and were now sitting in the reception area and as soon as I was done escorting them out, they burst into giggles. It didn't help when they went for a smoke and found the condom he obviously had lost on the stairs... more laughter.

Of course no one would look at him or even talk to him, when he came back... who knows where they went to shag...too awkward.

That was the main act, and I thought at that point it was all of the excitement, one night could bring. But I was wrong.

One of my other jobs is to clean the common areas of the hostel: kitchen, lounge and bathrooms. No problem, I've done that a few hundred times but guess who was sleeping in one of the showers? Yep, boytoy (he seems to have knack for bathrooms)!

At first I thought it was someone else, because there had been two really drunk boys and I was concerned one of them might puke. So woke him up to find out, if he was so drunk he worried about puking or if he just had locked himself out. Imagine my shock when it turned out to be boytoy! He of course wasn't happy to see me either, he was probably still pissed at me for cock blocking him and on top of that I woke him up. Buy he'll thank me in the morning, because he won't have a stiff neck or a sore back from sleeping on the hard floor in the way to short shower cabin.

An even if he is pissed off with me now, I was just doing my job buddy!