Hotel Stories and A Cheesy, Sausagy Baguette

I’ve missed my weird part-time jobs.

Weird part-time jobs have been an essential part of my successfully living in Europe for this long.

There was that time I corrected (i.e. rewrote) a lettre de motivation for a girl applying for university and essentially had to stalk her in order to get paid. I had a lot of time on my hands at the time and ended up calling her, repeatedly, and even though she pretended to be her own landlord when I called and then e-mailed me saying her wallet had been stolen, I eventually got my money — all 80 euro of it. Success.

Then there was the time I called about a hundred restaurants to make sure that they were still opened. TCB started making fun of me because I would call and pretend I was going to make a reservation, but then I never would. Then he made even more fun of me because I started just calling and asking if they were still opened, point blank, no nonsense. Much faster.

I once had a job to set up someone’s Internet, but I had to pay the Country Boy to go in my stead, because I realized once I showed up that I didn’t know how to set up Internet, and that the people who call someone to set up their Internet aren’t necessarily too stupid to figure out which cord is the phone line and which cord is an ethernet cable. Sometimes it’s actually hard. Luckily, they took it well, and TCB got 20 bucks out of it.

My most recent in the line of weird jobs is visiting hotels pretending to be a client, like secret shopping but instead, I’m inspecting bathrooms. Some are five-star hotels, where I get a personal escort through the halls, into palatial bathrooms and secret, private executive clubhouses. Others are budget hotels where the person at the front desk hands me five keys and basically tells me to go nuts.

When I first started this particular weird job, I used a weird accent I had concocted that I thought made my plight more believable. In what turned out to be a very convincing version of an American who is still learning French and has memorized a few key phrases, I would tell them that my parents were coming to visit at Easter, and I would like to see a room. I had all sorts of extra details about their trop memorized, just in case.

It took me about two months to realize that no one actually cared. After that, I started speaking with my regular accent, the one that people sort of listen to, and then wait… and then ten minutes or twenty minutes or sometimes a few weeks later ask me, “Where are you from?” “Ça vient d’où, ce petit accent ?” They’re usually surprised to hear I’m American — I apparently don’t have an American accent — but when I ask them where they thought I was from, they never have an answer.

Which, I suppose, is a large part of why I found it so surprising that a concierge at one of the hotels, after I’d spoken maybe two sentences, started speaking to me in Italian. He was Neapolitan, convinced I was Italian too. I russled up my college Italian and managed to say that my father had Sicilian origins. He asked me — in Italian — if I preferred to speak in English, French or Italian. I chose English. He spoke with a faint accent.

I’ve almost forgotten how important it once was to me to be Italian, to be perceived as being Italian, to be part of that group. After all, the first place I sought out when I moved to Toronto was Little Italy. The first recipes I tried to master were tomato sauce and lasagna and tiramisu. For a long time, Italian was more a part of my identity than American was.

And yet I learned, soon after moving to France, that as expats, our secondary identities take a tertiary place. We’re expats, then Americans. Then you can be something else, if you want to. I kind of stopped wanting to, but I don’t know why.

At another hotel on the same day, a manager discovered I was American — through my petit accent, though he first assumed I was German. He told me there was an American intelligentsia who liked France and asked me if I had read any Carson McCullers, printed the page for me off of Wikipedia so that I could look up the works. He told me that he never had any people of color in his hotel, though he sometimes got “Mexicans from California.” Before I even had time to be shocked, he told me that racism wasn’t alive in America, but it was present. When I tried to discuss it with him, I was rebuffed; he had met a lot of Americans, you see. He knew how it was. I folded the Wikipedia page and stuck it in my pocket. I still haven’t decided if I’m going to take him up on his suggestion.

All this to say, the strange, little part-time jobs are back. In fact, the strange, little part-time jobs are my full-time job now. I’m my own boss for the first time since… maybe the first time ever. I’m not a student. I’m not living at home. I’m not waiting to hear back on a full-time position, or consulting, or doing anything except exactly what I want to. Writing. Translating. And doing occasional strange little jobs, because without the strange little jobs, I wouldn’t have all that much to write about.

I’ve never been so excited to go to work.

Sausage Baguette (adapted from Lady and Pups)

1 baguette
2 herbed sausages (I used Toulouse sausage, but Italian sausage would be great)
1 400 g can of whole tomatoes
1 onion, chopped
2 cloves of garlic, minced
1 pinch red chili flakes
1 tsp. soy sauce
4 ounces mozzarella cheese

Cut the baguette into four sections, or if you have an American sized oven, keep it whole. Cut through the baguette from the top, lengthwise, leaving about an inch in tact at either end of the baguette. You’re going to be stuffing it from the top, and you don’t want the stuffing to leak out the sides.

Remove the sausages from their casings. Heat a large pot and add the sausages, breaking them up with a wooden spoon. Cook until nice and browned, then remove, leaving behind the fat. Reserve the sausage.

Add the onion. Sauté for 5-7 minutes, until translucent and slightly browned. Add the garlic and sauté for 1 minute. Add the tomatoes and chili flakes. Cook for about 20 minutes, stirring occasionally. Add the soy sauce and remove the pot from the heat.

Use an immersion blender to blend the sauce. Add the sausage back to the pot.

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees.

Place the baguettes on an aluminum-lined baking sheet. Spoon the sauce into the baguettes. Slice the cheese and distribute over the top. Bake until the cheese is browned and bubbly. Serve.