In Which Moroccans are Delightful

This post is just going to be a few mostly unconnected anecdotes of my life – which is actually probably how most of my posts will be from now on. That’s kind of how my life feels right now. The work schedule provides the structure and sameness in each week, but interesting things are always happening here and there.

So last week Sunday was probably the physically hardest day of work so far… we were open until 9:30 because the park had extra magic hours until 11pm. And Sunday is always our busiest day anyway, I suppose because Liberty Tree seems like a fitting place to eat, it being served family style and all. And they had me stocking during dinner. At first there’s always nothing to do because they haven’t used anything yet. I had just checked around again and found everything still full when one of the servers said, “The apple juice is out.” So I got the key from Kristin (a manager) and trucked downstairs to replace the syrup, glad that the apple juice boxes are half the size of the other boxes, and at the bottom, so it wouldn’t be too hard. Well, I got down there, replaced the apple juice… and discovered that a bunch of the other syrups were out too. (There’s two boxes per drink per station, so they were still working, but once the other box ran out they’d be done.) So I replaced them – I had to call in passing guys to lift a couple of them because they were on the top shelf. I replaced a total of nine syrup boxes. And then I went upstairs, and all the glasses at far side were gone. Bother, bother, I’d never let them run out of anything before. So I ran around replacing everything – near side was almost out too. And that was pretty much how it went the rest of the night, because we were so busy. And because the servers were so busy, they kept asking me to get things they ran out of that aren’t technically part of stocking, like lemon slices and sugar-free raspberry syrup and chocolate milk and the little cream pitchers. On the third or fourth “could you get us…” I started singing, “Cinderannie, Cinderannie, night and day it’s Cinderannie…” But they were so appreciative that I didn’t really mind. There are advantages to being small, one of which is that people have pity on you when you’re doing hard work. The bad thing, though, was that after stocking for five and a half hours, instead of going home I had to close. All that means is standing by the podium and waving goodbye to people until they’re all gone, so it isn’t very hard, but I was pretty dazed by the time I was going home...
Recently I got to be trained to be greeter, which means I learned how to check people in on the computer and make reservations. For some reason I find it to be great fun, perhaps because it’s interesting. I like calling people up to the second podium (the “door” person is the main greeter and is at the first one) to check in, and if they don’t have a reservation I ask on the radio how long they’ll have to wait. And I am very good at explaining about staying in the lobby. Because we don’t know which people will show up for their reservations and who won’t. So we might say that it will be 35-45 minutes because we have a lot of reservations, but then if several don’t show up and we can seat them earlier, we will. Sometimes the door people don’t explain very well and then when we say 35-45 minutes, they take their pager, and then half their party leaves to go get fastpasses from somewhere or something, and then when in 15 minutes their pager goes off we can’t seat them because we have to have everyone together, and then they are annoyed. We have to have everyone together because we are almost always fully booked and if we are having to wait for the rest of the party to arrive, order, and eat, that table takes that much longer to be done, and meanwhile people are waiting impatiently in the lobby. Know who the crankiest people are? The ones who are all by themselves, and they come in with no reservation thinking that they can just get in, and we tell them it will be 35-45 minutes (because we have a lot of parties of two coming in who have reservations). They decide to stay… but 30 minutes later they’re up at the podium yelling at me that it shouldn’t take this long for just one person and that they’ve seen lots of parties seated who came in after them. I explain politely that the parties were either of a different size, or had reservations, but they keep yelling at me anyway, and then say they want to see a manager. I like it when they say that; it means that Kristin or Mandy can deal with them instead of me. But other than those people, I really like greeting. I’m not sure exactly why. Maybe I just like feeling in charge…

We have a lot of servers who are from Morocco: Brahim, Mo, Achraf, Najib, and Sebat, and a couple others whose names I don’t remember. When they all get together in one of the side stations (the place where they get drinks for the guests) they will all start speaking Moroccan. It sounds really cool. They all speak English very well too, of course, albeit with a charming accent.
One night, a couple weeks ago, I was seating a party of guests and I told them,
“Achraf will be your server this evening.”
“Does he speak English well?” one guest inquired, in that sort of haughtily anxious way someone might ask to be sure that the dishes are washed properly or that you’ll be dressing nicely for their honored guests.
“Yes, he speaks English very well,” I replied sweetly. I would have preferred to reply coldly rather than sweetly, but one must be polite to guests. I couldn’t decide whether to be extremely indignant or extremely amused. Over the next weeks as I got to know Achraf, I realized that he would get a huge kick out of it. So one night when he was in the side station and didn’t seem too busy, I asked him with a suppressed grin,
“Achraf, do you speak English well?” He looked slightly baffled, and George, who was also in the side station, said teasingly,
“Oh no, he doesn’t speak English at all.” I rolled my eyes at him and continued to Achraf,
“One of the guests wanted to know.”
“What?” he said, still baffled.
“Well, I told them that Achraf would be their server, and they asked me if you spoke English well. So do you?” I grinned, and he burst out laughing.
“Really?! They asked you that?! Just from the name? Oh no, what table is it?”
“Oh, it was a while ago,” I explained.
“Oh, man, you should have told me! I could have had so much fun with that!” He shook his head, grinning mischievously. “Can – I – take – your – order?” he said slowly, exaggerating his accent.
“Oh dear, I think it’s good I didn’t tell you at the time,” I said. But we laughed about it for the rest of the night, and periodically when he saw me he’d exclaim,
“I can’t believe they asked you that!”
While we’re talking about Morocco (sort of) I think I will tell you about my wonderful Monday morning. On Sunday night (this past Sunday, not the Sunday of stocking forever), when I came home from work Kari was over. So she and Tiff and I were hanging out. Have I told about Kari? Maybe not. She and Dori are Tiff’s friends from back home who started their college programs about halfway through January. Kari and I have connected really well, almost more than Tiff and I do. It’s cool. Especially since originally she and I were both worried that Tiff liked the other one of us better… yeah, that was pretty silly. But anyway, one of the things with us is that we like to always communicate openly what we are thinking and feeling, that if something’s bothering us, big or small, we’ll let the other person know so that we can work it out. In this case, Kari was feeling worried that we would never see each other because Tiff and I both have to work a lot. The thing that means the most to her is spending quality time together, and even though she knew in her head that we couldn’t help our work schedules, her emotions were still telling her that she must not be loved because we weren’t spending time with her. Well, I had the next morning off because I didn’t have to come in until 3:45 instead of noon, so since she was off too, I proposed that we hang out together. We agreed to meet at 10am and head over to World Showcase at Epcot, to be there right when it opened, at 11.
Well, we were at World Showcase when the golden morning light poured down on the nearly empty streets, and the cast members were just opening up the shops. It was beautiful. I’d only ever been at World Showcase in the afternoon, because I guess our usually way of doing a day at Epcot is to start in Future World first thing and then go over to the countries. Well, England is beautiful in the morning. We wandered through the tea shop, and admired the purple flowers growing on a trellis over a path.
In Morocco (see, it did connect back, it just took a while…) we wandered through the little shops that had all kinds of Moroccan things, all beautiful, and we each tried on a beautiful shirt – they are made of lightweight fabric, very flowing, and with embroidery at the collar and sleeves. Kari’s was tan with silver embroidery, mine was black with pink. Kari had been wanting a shirt from Morocco since she came in August, and the one she chose looked lovely on her, so she bought it. I liked mine a lot – for twenty dollars I would have bought it without thinking twice – but I didn’t like it fifty dollars worth. It was different for Kari, she’d been thinking about it and wanting hers for a long time – like me with my Scottish cloak. It was made in Scotland and it’s 100% lambs wool and so soft and beautiful. So I had my saved up special thing already.
Now the food in Morocco smelled absolutely wonderful, and we were getting hungry. We looked at the menu of Restaurant Makkaresh, the sit-down restaurant. We each saw and appetizer that looked good to us – mine was something that was either the same or similar to something I had with my grandparents on my birthday. Then we saw the Combination Appetizer for Two – it included both the things we liked the look of, plus one other thing! It was decided. We went in to the restaurant and we seated right away. It was almost empty. Our waiter was very kind, and it was peaceful in the restaurant. We looked over the drinks, and Kari decided to try the Moroccan coffee. I wanted to drink something interesting too, but it seemed that everything else was alcoholic and I don’t like coffee. Then I saw something called a “Moroccan sunrise” – non-alcoholic, a blend of pineapple juice, strawberries, and orange water. Oooh. So we both got our special drinks. And mine was really good.
Just after we got our drinks, another guy, not our waiter, brought us bread.
“Moroccan bread,” he said, setting it before us, and then, with a half smile, “and American butter.” It was real butter, at least, and not margarine. The bread was a small round loaf, cut in half with half for each of us, crispy on the outside and soft on the inside. Then our appetizers came. It was a small salad that seemed to have similar ingredients to a Greek salad but with a different sort of dressing. And the two things we had wanted, which were two kinds of pastries, one with beef and one with chicken. When I describe they sound strange – they were somehow both spicy and sweet. The pastry was light and flaky as pastry ought to be and had cinnamon and powdered sugar on top.
We ate almost ceremonially. First the salad, until it was gone. Then half of the chicken pastry. We couldn’t figure out whether to use our fingers or the forks. But trying to use a knife and fork made the pastry go all to pieces, so we just ate with our fingers – and then ended up licking them because how could you waste any of that wonderful cinnamon and powdered sugar? When our waiter came by I asked him,
“Are you supposed to eat the pastry with your fingers or a fork?”
“Well, we eat it with our fingers,” he said, “but you could use a fork if you wanted to.”
“Oh no, fingers work better,” I said. “The fork makes the pastry come apart.”
“Well, there you have it,” he said. So we ate with our fingers guiltlessly – and licked them almost guiltlessly. When we’d eaten about half of the chicken pastry we started eating the beef as well so that we could eat them together, along with the bread we still had some of. It had looked like a rather small amount of food, but the pastry was very filling and we were both stuffed by the end. When we were done, the waiter took our dishes away and then – to our surprise and delight – poured a little rose water into our hands from a golden bottle for us to “refresh” them with. We were walking around smelling our hands for the rest of the morning.

I had another very good time on Tuesday night, but I think writing about it will have to wait, since this is already four pages long. But later… and there’s pictures of that one that you can see if you let me know your e-mail address somehow so I can e-mail you the link to them.

In Which Cinderannie Starts a New Job

Note to self: Never promise another post “tomorrow.” It’s not a good idea.



Anyway, the time has come for a post of some bits and pieces and anecdotes and descriptions from the Liberty Tree Tavern. They'll be a bit disorganized, but at least I’ll start with training.


How enjoyable your training is depends almost entirely on your trainer. My first time with custodial-specific training, was, as you may recall, dreadful, because I had a not-very-magical instructor whose personality did not complement mine. Then the next two days, I had a fairly good trainer, who if not extremely magical at least made training interesting.
For my first day of Liberty Tree training, I had a wonderful trainer. His name was William, and he is the best person I have ever met at staying in character. I and three other girls were training together, and we were all in our costumes. A note on costumes would, I think, be, good, so you can picture us. The girls’ costume is a top and skirt (but it looks like a dress) that’s a slate blue with floral trim, an apron, and a bonnet sort of hat. I’ll post a picture if I can get one. The guys costume is slate blue knickers and a white long-sleeved shirt with a navy blue vest over it. The knickers are supposed to button at the cuff, but the costume makers seriously underestimated the muscularity of our guys’ calves, so… very few of the cuff buttons get buttoned.
Anyway, William gave us the grand tour of Liberty Square. A lot of it was very familiar to me (“the attractions in Liberty Square are the Haunted Mansion, the Hall of Presidents, and the Liberty Belle steamboat”…) given how often I’d walked around in the area both as a custodial and on days off, but it was so much fun to trail around in our costumes! I felt like I really belonged there. Once a guest asked if he could take our picture. We agreed, of course, and I felt like a celebrity.
William warned us not to cross over into Frontierland.
“We don’t go over there,” he explained. “That’s too wild for us – they’ve got gunfights and cowboys and I don’t know what all else. We’ve got enough to worry about with our own war going on over here.” He’s the first person I’ve known who could say things like that without ever breaking – you know, doing the half-smile or wink, and without using an “I’m telling a story” voice. He said it like he was explaining not to cross the yellow line on a ride, or something like that – like he was perfectly serious about the whole thing. I loved it. This continued for the rest of the day, including when he was showing us where to get the pixie dust to put on people’s tables if someone had a birthday – “delivered to us by Tinkerbelle herself,” he declared. Putting pixie dust on the birthday tables is one of my favorite things – although I have a sneaking suspicion that the handwritten sign that recently appeared above the pixie dust reading “please do not grab too much pixie dust” was directed at me…
The second day of training was not quite as exciting. Ashley was our trainer. Although she was not as in-character, I’m still glad we had her for the second day, because William had a tendency to skip over details, and we needed someone a little more practical to fill in the gaps.
There are five different jobs that we do as seaters. (“Seater” is our overall heading, distinguishing us from “servers.”) I’m going to describe them all for you so that you know what I’m talking about later when I say that I did such-and-such.
Seating. This means that when a slip of paper with a family on it prints out at the podium, we take it and the menus they need, summon the family, and take them to their table. We used to call “Hear ye, hear ye! Let it be known that we are now seating the _____ family of the colony/territory of __________!” I thought that this was fun. However, we have a pager system now, so we just punch in the number of the pager and the family comes to us. Or at least that’s how it’s supposed to work. Sometimes the number is wrong or the pager isn’t working or whatever, and then if they don’t come we call. We also get a high chair or booster seat if the paper says they need one.
Table-setting. This means wiping off the table, sweeping the floor under it if it needs it, and setting the silverware and napkins (and at dinner, salad plates). We used to have to stack all the dishes on the table onto a tray for the server to take away. We didn’t have to carry the tray unless we wanted to. But there were some people from Tony’s restaurant over at Liberty for a while because Tony’s was closed for refurbishment. And at the rest of the restaurants seaters don’t have to bus tables. So the Tony’s people went back and told their people, “At Liberty Tree we had to bus tables!” And those people said, “Hey, they shouldn’t have to bus tables! The other seaters don’t have to bus tables. They aren’t getting busser pay. You can’t make them bus tables.” So we don’t have to bus tables any more, and the servers have to do it themselves. They have mostly taken it very well, although on one of the first days of it I did hear one of them singing, “I’ve seen better days…” But when it gets really busy we still bus them for them. And even when it’s not busy I do Patty’s tables, because she’s the nicest server ever and she used to bus her own tables when she didn’t have to. But the ones who never did their own and who would leave the trays for ages hoping we’d carry them for them… Kim the assigner (she figures out where to put which guests) declares I am not allowed to bus their tables because they need to learn to do it themselves. Another side note about table-setting: whenever I am wiping a round table I feel like I’m back home as a child wiping our dining room table for supper because it is the same color of wood and it was round back when there weren’t such a lot of us and we didn't put all the leaves in.
Folding napkins. Umm… it’s pretty self-explanatory. Fold it in half, fold the two sides into the middle, fold it in half again. Either in the GT office (which is crowded and claustrophobic) or in the Diamond Horseshoe (which is large, beautiful, and pleasant). I wouldn’t want to fold napkins every day, but it makes a very nice break if I’m feeling tired or want to pursue my own thoughts. Also it’s fun to be in the Diamond Horseshoe because periodically various interesting people come by, like the Frontierland street musicians. I think I have forever endeared myself to one of them because I knew that his instrument was a sousaphone, and listened with great interest to him explaining the different finishes of brass instruments. And sometimes the piano player who’s usually at Casey’s corner comes in and plays the piano that’s onstage to practice. When we’re table setting we fold napkins for the first hour (because no tables need setting yet) and when we get all girls and sit around the same table it feels like a quilting bee.
Fourth, set-ups. This means taking the folded napkins and putting a knife, big fork, and little fork on each one. (I am amused by the fact that while technically I suppose they are dinner forks and salad forks, I have never heard anyone refer to them that way. Even the managers call them big forks and little forks.) Then you stack them up and put them on the shelves according to how many – two, four, six, and eight, because those are the table sizes. Then when a table setter needs them, they just come take the stack of however many they need instead of having to count them. Oh, and I had better tell you that instead of “table for four” or “table for six,” we call it a “four-top” or a “six-top.” That’s also used to designate the stacks of napkins and silverware (aka “set-ups”), as in “I’m going to clean table 302, could you grab me a six-top?” Set-ups is another rather dull job, but it also makes a nice break because you can think about whatever you want to.
Last, stocking. This means bringing glasses, coffee mugs, trays, and ice to the drink stations on each side of the restaurant as they are needed, and taking the trash out of the drink stations when it gets full. It is hard work because the things are rather heavy, but it makes the time go by quickly. Some people hate it but I don’t mind it. Actually, it’s kind of fun. Especially like yesterday when Tam the server was impressed with how hard I was working and asked me if I wanted to work in his bakery someday when he starts it. I said, “Sure.” That seemed like the right sort of answer since of course I wouldn’t really promise to take a job sometime in the indeterminate future in an unknown location, but I liked the idea of it. Sort of like my mom and her friend saying they were going to run away to Tahiti. Stocking yesterday was actually very dull. For some reason nobody wanted to eat at Liberty Tree for lunch. Half the restaurant was empty, and we were all standing around bored. Although it was nice because I got to chat with some of the servers, and normally we’re all running around like crazy and can’t do that. Then when it was dinner time, we had a million people because it was raining outside and everyone wanted to come in and eat. We set towels out on the desk because everyone was coming in soaking wet…

Dinner at Liberty Tree is a character dinner, with Goofy, Minnie, Pluto, and Chip and Dale. I love them; they make life interesting… the first day I was table setting, I had put the silverware out on a table and was about to set out the plates, when Goofy came up and indicated to me that I ought to set the plates by standing in one place and frisbeeing them into their respective positions! I told him that I couldn’t do that, I would surely break the plates. “I could do it,” he said. I just shook my head and laughed. (And of course, he didn’t really say, “I could do it” out loud. But the characters say what they mean so well that when I think about it afterward, I can’t remember what motions they used, only what they communicated to me. So throughout my tales, I will say what the characters “said” as I understood it, quotation marks and all, rather than attempting to recall the motions they used to convey it. It’s easier.) And they are always teasing and goofing around, especially if we aren’t very busy or it’s toward the end of the night. Then Goofy will be balancing a tray on his nose, or putting one knee on a chair and sliding across the floor, pushing with the other foot as though it was a scooter, and Chip and Dale and Goofy will all be pulling each other’s aprons off, so the character attendants have to fix them… Patrick the character captain shakes his finger at them and scolds them, reminding me of a grumpy grandfather of several rambunctions children, who shakes his head and orders them to behave and pretends to be cranky but really loves them all.

I expect that’s enough for tonight. At least now you have a picture of what I’m doing these days. I’m working long hours, but enjoying it. And my coworkers are great too. Oh and Tiff (my roommate)’s friends Kari and Dory have arrived from Washington state to start their college programs, and we’re hitting it off just marvelously, especially Kari and I who spent all of today together and had a grand time. Most fun I’ve ever had running errands, I think. Oh and I bought my mother’s birthday presents today :-) It was the last day of the 40% holiday discount so of course I spent way too much money. I’m think I’m a bit of a spendthrift.
(Of course after thinking that I had to look up spendthrift on dictionary.com to see if that was true. Most of the definitions talked about spending money “wastefully,” “recklessly,” or “foolishly.” I don’t think I do that. But there was one definition that I think fits, from the Kennerman English Multilingual Dictionary. “A person who spends his money freely and carelessly.” That’s it exactly. I tend to spend money freely and carelessly. But then I make my own food cheaply (I can make a whole pot of hearty nutritious vegetable soup for a little over $5!) and don’t spend lots of money eating out to make up for it. But this is the last shopping spree type trip, because I don’t have the discount excuse anymore. From now on all purchases are thought about carefully and pondered for a few weeks before I decide if I really want it badly enough to spend the money on it. Okay, enough of me rambling about being a spendthrift…)
Oh and I have a library card now! At some point I’ll have to tell that story…

Love to all, and good night.