First days, first impression

To start with, I completed my internship at the Legends, a five star hotel in Mauritius, in the department of Human Resources.

The first feeling I had when I started the placement was unfortunately not really positive. In fact, when I was thinking about a five star hotel, what came firstly to my mind was more about luxury, beauty, peace and open spaces... You can imagine my surprise on my first day, when I discovered the Human Resource office which looked more like a tin can than a place of escape and harmony (as the brochure describes the hotel)!

The office was made of three narrow and crowed rooms, nearly without windows and illuminated by neon lights. This office counted five employees and we were three interns trying to find a place to sit and work on our projects. It took me about a week to get used to this stifling environment, in other words a quarter of my internship.

During a month, one of the intern in HR department and I, tried desperately to find proper places to work and most of the time we were allocated a conference room for few hours a day and with internet access... Halleluiah! I must say that this was quite a mission, running in the hotel all the time with our laptops, trying to find a free place where we would be allowed to stay and asked to leave sooner or later.

I am not sure what I have learned from this experience except that there is a huge difference and a huge gap between what is offered to the client and what is offered to the staffs, that is probably logic. I also understood that what is written in this beautiful brochure about the Legends is not applied to the back stage or this would be too good to be true!