Monthly Archives: March 2009

Rajshekar and Jeewan

This week we have Rajshekar and family and Jeavan and family who are joining us. Rajshekar arrived yesterday and Jeewan is going to be with us today. Jeewan is driving all the way from Chittor….

This is again going to be a very long stretch for us, We have Ganesh and his family who is going to be with us over the week, leaving on 26th.

It is particularly satisfying to have Ganesh with us, the first ever blog post that I made about a team visiting us was about Ganesh!! Check it out here, I will miss not being with Manas and Bhavana this time :-(

Welcome to Bethel home stay folks!!

Manu and friends

After the long extended weekend, we were lightly loaded for this week, which was a big relief for us. We had Manu,his wife Richa and the their friends Sanjay and Rakesh who joined us for the weekend.

Bethel home stay was referred to them by Murari who was with us last month.

Extended week..

This time we are having a really long extended weekend, we are occupied from the 4th to the 12th of March.

Here are the folks who are there…

We had Dilip, Mala and their children Suraj and Swathi along with Emil and his wife Leno on the 4th and 5th of March. The left on 6th morning.

We had Vinay, Sowmya and their one year old daughter joining us on the 6th. The were with us on 6th and the 7th. They left on 8th morning. btw, It was Sowmya’s birthday over the weekend. Sowmya, hope you had a memorable weekend. Many wishes from the Bethel team..

We have Moinak and his family, who are going to be with us from the 7th till the 9th of March.

We have Jack and his family who are going to be with us from the 8th till the 10th of March.

We have Roopesh who will be joining us on the 9th of March

And finally Dr Tejas, who is an old regular guest of ours, is going to be with us from the 10th to the 12th of March.

Problems..

Some problems are nice to have while others, well, are just problems.

We seem to having enough of both kinds now.

The nice stuff first….

We are running full from the 4th of March to the 12th — 9 straight days. So why is that a problem ? Well, When you walk into a hotel, have you ever wondered what all happens behind all those clean sheets and spic and span rooms? Do you really believe that you were the first ever person to occupy those rooms? Well ?

Here is what happens at Bethel,

We have an inventory of over 10 times the number of beds for bed covers and almost a similar ratio for pillow covers and towels, the moment one guest leaves, we clean all the rooms, ground up, starting from the bathrooms, everything is disinfected, all complimentary stocks, i.e. Soap, shampoos, toothpaste etc. are disposed off.  New stock is put in place, hand wash bottles are replenished and most importantly everything is made dry. Next we move to the bedrooms, remove all covers – bed sheets, pillow covers, towels, hand towels, blankets..et all.., dust the furniture, move it out, disinfect the floors, move the furniture back in place, put all new covers in — it is an elaborate ritual, that is meticulously followed when any guest leaves.  The bed sheets, covers etc are hand washed, dried and put back in the storeroom.

We are a small homestay, all of this takes time and effort, and our staff is limited. Most folks double up doing different duties. Almost everybody does everything….and that everybody includes Rakesh,  Arun and I.  Normally, we are full on weekends and have few guests during week days and while the world goes back to work, we, take a break.

Nine-Ten continuous days of  a full house takes a big toll on our systems, at the end of it, our staff is plain crabby, our inventories severely depleted and everybody is  just longing for a break!!

We work, stretch to our maximum and make sure all our guests are happy — this is a nice problem to have, this is what we are here for, in spite of everything, we would rather have this problem than not.

Other things are, well, Just problems…

Our website http://www.bethelestate.com has been down for 3 days now!! Now, this is  a problem I can do without!!. Going to the site, it says that the domain name has expired on 4th March!!! It was really embarrassing, Moinak, who is our guest this weekend, pointed it out to Rakesh. Apparantly in the case of Manashosting, the folks who are hosting our site, what one hand does the other doesn’t know!!. The site has been renewed for three years and the amount paid..but that information has not flowed down the technical department or whoever is supposed to ensure that the site keeps running!!! I have had two SOS chats with Manashosting, and tomorrow the site should be up permanently.. (I hope).I really don’t know how all this is going to effect our ranking in search engines and how many customers I have lost because of this :-(

The Mumbaikars..

Most of the crowd that comes to Coorg is from Bangalore,  Chennai ranks next, but on this Valentine’s day we had Sheela and gang from Mumbai. They are a group of eight, but only five, Sheela, Norma, Sambhav, Haseeb and Brandon, made it to Coorg.

They reached Srimangala by around 2 in the afternoon and were received by Arun, who took got them via the Tata Tea estate. By the time they arrived we had the food ready and waiting for them.  They rested till 4-5 in the evening and then went on our short trek to see the sunset. They were joined by, Manju and Murari, the other guests who were with us on that weekend.

Everyone was able to the mild trek comfortably, everyone except Sambhav, that is. Sambhav needed the classic trekker guide encouragement method, every time he would ask how much more to go, Rakesh who was their guide would say “Just two more minutes to go”.  Two more minutes, two more minutes, two more minutes ….till finally the exasperated Sambhav burst out that this two minutes were just never ending :-) . To his credit, he did make it to the top.

The campfires were lit and ready when they returned from the trek. They had dinner and partied late into the night.

The next day morning they went down to the stream, and left after lunch to Bangalore via Dubare and Kushal Nagar.

Every now and then a group comes in that is fun loving and jovial  — this was one such group, constantly ribbing each other, friendly, it is a pleasure to have them around and very hard to not join the fun. Rakesh got himself a title of “Mr. Bhuddiman” from Sheela and Norma, whose full name  “Norma Mendonza”, Rakesh decided was too complicated to pronounce, became “Normal Samosa”

It was nice to have them around. Thanks for coming guys!!

Here are of the photographs of their Coorg trip, including Dubare and Kushal Nagar.

Busy week

We had a busy week.

We had Nirmal joining us with his wife Pearly along with Vittal Gavasker and his wife Uma on the 24th.

Then on the 28th weekend, we had Shireen and team, who were sent to us by Jiten, who was with us last year in December (more about Jiten’s stay here) and also Vijesh and team.

More about them later..