We´re having a slight problem here with people booking rooms with shared bathrooms and then arriving to discover that they have to, gasp, share a bathroom! Like, with other people! It´s really hard to be too sympathetic when people become totally enraged because they don´t have their own bathrooms. They did book a room with a shared bath. So this morning, we had one such case. Poor Gil got the brunt of it from a Belgian lady in a bath towel. I had to deal with it again later. ¨This is HOTEL, not camping¨was the refrain. I wanted to yell ¨Hostel! Hostel!¨back at her, but I managed to control myself. There´s not much else to do aside from smile and apologize. I can´t make a bathroom magically appear in each room.

We´ve added bunks to the hostel finally. It´s a little stressful now managing the comings and goings of 27 people instead of 21. To test it out, we have a family of 16 staying with us! So we´re at max capacity. The biggest concern is how much impact adding 6 people to the shared bathrooms is going to do. So far, it´s not looking to great with big groups who all need to be someplace (clean) at the same time. Otherwise, we should be fine.

I´ll put pictures up later. I know this blog has gotten pretty boring without any photos. I´m working on it.

Another crazy day at the hostel. We had some male guests get a little aggressive with us over the fact that we don't make the beds and change towels every day. The guy got really angry and red in the face yelling at us about how "this is spain! we're in spain! in spain they make your beds at hostels!" Lee's natural response is to stand up next to the guest, thus demonstrating her towering height. I sat at the desk saying "shhh shhh tranquilo." I've never seen someone get so worked up about an unmade bed. We've adopted a kill 'em with kindness strategy for the rest of their stay, and Lee left some chocolates on their freshly made beds this evening. We'll see what the response is.

Then later this evening, I heard pounding and yelling in the stairwell. I was totally confused, and finally had to yell "Where are you yelling from?" Turns out a family of four was stuck in our elevator. Fortunately, we´d already had experience with this, and I was able to get them right out. I´m pretty sure the boys thought it was a fun adventure.

We have someone coming in today to help with the cleaning! Finally!

We've been open 7 weeks now, and I'd estimate I've made at least 300 beds. I think I've reached my limit. Lee and I are finding it really hard to get all the cleaning done every day and not be too exhausted to get all the other required work done. We've got so many little things like accounting, general maintenance, reservations, etc to do day-to-day, that it'll be nice to get most of the cleaning off of our plate. Plus we have all kinds of fun things we still want to do at the hostel like writing walking tours, putting together a spanish/cataln phrase book, planning wine tastings, and more. I think this will be a really good step.

Another rowdy group of boys in town. This time they're Dutch, drinking beer (not coffee), and running around in even less clothing. Fun fun.

I'm on night shift right now. That means I'll be dozing off at the computer while guests trickle in until the wee hours. Lauren will relieve me at six and I'll go home to sleep for a few hours until it's time to get up and clean some more rooms! This hostelier lifestyle is really glamorous.

There's one major thing that happened this week that Lauren neglected to post so I'll cover it now:

The elevator in our building is a constant point of contention. It's a terribly old, wooden compartment (with perhaps the most colorful graffiti in town) that has dutch doors inside and a normal door on each floor. It won't move unless all doors are closed and unaware guests often leave them open, much to our neighbor's discontent. Well, I wish I could say our biggest problem was neighbor complaints.

This week, someone got stuck. Someone got stuck on our floor. At first, I thought Lauren was dropping a drum beat on the boxy bag of laundry that was just delivered but then I realized the pounding was coming from the elevator shaft. We were very lucky in that it wasn't a guest but it was our very trusty laundry man who, I'm quite afraid, may be skipping our stop in the future.

After about 2.3 seconds of sheer panic, I ran down to the ally-neighbor who pulled out this magic piece of paper with the answers to the universe's problems on it. I started to wonder if they have a file folder dedicated to the elevator crib sheet but a man was trapped and I don't know how to say "crib sheet" in Spanish. We went to the basement to the elevator machine room, cut the power, dropped the break, and MANUALLY cranked the cables.

The man was sweating like Jordi Cortada and I'm pretty sure I saw a new rendering of the male genitalia on the door frame, but our dependable laundry man was freed after a slow ride to the main floor. At the very least, now we know what to do if this happens again. And I'm sure this will happen again.

So much for the beautiful spring weather of Barcelona. It's HAILING right now.

I'm glad I got lazy and parked the car in a garage today!

Customer reviews online are slowly trickling in. I'm almost as obsessed with checking them as I am with checking our web hits. They're a tricky thing though. It seems that the only people who decide to take the time to write reviews are people who either had horrible experiences or really really utterly fantastic ones. I don't think the results accurately reflect the average guest's experience.

We're at about an 8 out of 10 on the biggest site. If you take out all the reviews from French guests, we're at at least a 9. We had a little problem early on where our hostel listing was improperly translated to French. Our northern neighbors were showing up expecting a hotel with concierge desks and uniformed bellhops, and instead they were getting, well, us.

I really think the key is taking the time to get to know each guest and being very social with everyone. We were very enthusiastic hosts upon opening but soon got exhausted and could barely manage smiles. It was reflected in some lower ratings from guests we didn't take the time to talk to. Now we're re-dedicating some time to making each guest feel very at home, personalizing recommendations for them, etc. Even if our satisfied guests don't write reviews, it's rewarding to hear their compliments in person.

We've already gotten gifts of chocolate twice from happy guests! That's better than any darn review.

We met a lawyer very briefly when we got here for an introduction and to figure out his fees. We wound up not working with him because he was a bit pricey and his profuse sweating made us uneasy. After 18 months of silence, he emailed us a few weeks ago to congratulate us on opening and ask where he can send his bill. We totally ignored him, laughing.

Yesterday, he emails us an invoice for 1300 euros for visa processing services and incorporation (which Lee and I did ourselves). I wrote him telling him he must be mistaken. He responded telling me that the fee was for an email he sent with some special documents attached (the visa application and incoporation process which require only a google search to find). Lee and I were one part amused and about fifty parts totally incredulous. I responded with a pretty brief "No way Jose" to this scam artist. Is this what the real world is like? Or is it just lawyers?

What is it with Italian guys? We've got a group of five here for a birthday party. If you can make a good espresso, they're ready to take you home to mamma. (Thanks Nespresso) They keep asking if I'll "fare un giro" with them tonight. I just manage a confused look and do my best to pretend that I didn't take six months of intensive Italian while living in Italy.

We had our first no-show last night. AND his credit card didn't work to charge the cancellation fee.

So, Ronaldo, if you're out there - just so you know, it hurt a little.

I've written before about my love for google analytics. As we get more and more web hits (averaging about 100 daily now), my love just grows. It's so cool to see other sites linking to yours. For instance, today I found this, part of a great* series of articles about Practical Trip Planning that mentions and links to Somnio! I also found a forum of photographers planning a group trip to Barcelona discussing our hostel as a possible place to stay. It's really awesome to know people aside from immediate family and friends are actually out there talking about our business.

*(not just great because it mentions us, but it helps)