Mucho Trabajo!

Daikokuya, a ramen joint in Downtown LA, is one of the busiest restaurants in Little Tokyo. A week ago, I started working there as a kitchen hand, a.k.a. "dish washer" ("kitchen hand" sounds more appreciated, doesn't it?). Working with me are 3-4 other Latinos, all of whom work at a ridiculously fast pace. The language predominantly spoken in the kitchen, as you can probably guess, is Spanish. And since "no hablo español", I'm having to interpret hand gestures, eyebrow movements, and repeated phrases in Greek, I mean, Spanish that won't make sense to me the 4th time since they didn't make sense to me the 1st time.

I speak 3 languages, and I'm working on #4 - French - but none of the languages I speak seems to help me communicate with the other kitchen workers, not significantly anyway. But somehow we manage. More and more, as the hours go by, those gestures and phrases become clearer, and my work develops a flow. They teach me by example as I watch their hands wash dishes like it's nobody's business. The only problem though is that it's very much my business. In fact, that's all I did last Friday and Saturday! But tonight, after a couple of extra guys came in at 10PM to help with the work load, I was called out to the front to bus tables! Believe it or not, this was a very anticipated event for me :). If there's one part-time job I wanted to experience, it was waiting tables. Don't ask me why; I couldn't tell you myself, but it might have something to do with the fact that I've been put in the kitchen at every restaurant I've worked for!

By the end of the night, the main chef in the front kitchen was telling everybody how he thought it made no sense for me to be working in the back when "this kid speaks English and Japanese fluently." Finally! Someone sees my amazing potential as a "busboy"! It's the day I've been waiting for :). I'm not sure if the manager's gonna let me switch positions 3 days into training, but both ways, there will always be "mucho trabajo" to do. Apurate guey!