New place, new job, new life: working on the Christmas Market in Münster

After spending 7 years living in The Hague my girlfriend and I moved to Münster. The city she originally comes from. In preparation for our trip we decided to leave The Hague behind and live in the basement of her mother’s house. You might think basement?! But it is much better than it sound like. We managed to turn that place into a home.

Münster is by far one of the prettiest European cities I’ve visited. The city is build around an old center, which survived the war pretty much unscaled and brings a very cosy feeling when walking around there.  This is a city full of history, and the peace of Westphalia is a highlight, effectively ending war disputes in Europe in 1648. When you walk around in this city you sometimes feel like you are part of something special. It is as if the building in the old center have stories to tell. Münster is a very special place to spend Christmas. With a total of 5 different Christmas markets and the entire atmosphere in the city will put you into the Christmas mood. Especially this year with snow and cold weather there was no better place to get Christmas swinging.

We decided to work a during the time that we would be there and as you might know, Muenster is renowned for its Christmas market. As surprising as this might sound, I got a job. I did not speak a word of German when I moved there, although Dutch comes close it still was going to be quite a challenge to actually work with a language you don’t speak.

[supsystic-gallery id=’2′]

So I became one of the drivers to deliver Glühwein and all kinds of treats to the Christmas stand. While I did the transport my girlfriend also got a job selling everything in the stand, at first sight pretty perfect. The working days were tough as I had to carry 30l jerry cans of Glühwein, boxes full of fresh cups weighing 28kg but it all seemed worth it to save some extra cash for our trip. Most of the times I would finish filling the warehouse early and I would join the girls working in the stand and have a few drinks with them. And even sell some drinks to ever thirsty and cold customers.

However as the days passed I started to notice something strange. Something that I at first couldn’t quite place. I got the feeling that some of the people that were close to the boss were behaving as if they owned the place. Let me paint a picture of the boss’s lovely daughter. A skinny, blond 18 year old girl still in highschool because she had to redo a year and was only busy with smoking, drinking and bossing people around. Now you can imagine the look on my face when she would start to boss me around as if I hadn’t seen the light of day before. But hey, it was the boss’ daughter, and who knows maybe I misunderstood, I was the one who didn’t speak German after all. But here comes the curious part. It wasn’t only the daughter that would behave so strangely towards me and the others. She had a boyfriend, 19 years old and behaved like he owned the world. Bossing around the other colleagues, bragging about how much he owned and what kind of luxury he was used to. Pretty shallow if you ask me. But the worst one of all was this lazy fellow driver. He was supposed to work with me, together on busy days we were supposed to run back and forth to provide the stand with all that they would need. And on busy days all hell broke lose. I think the girls in the stand didn’t get a moment of rest to even catch their breath, eat or drink. It was just non stop work for them. When they are that busy our job was to continuously provide the stand with fresh glühwein, cups, food and change. This is a tough job for you are running with around 90l of glühwein on your cart through a mass people all getting drunk. If I had a euro for the amount of times I’ve heard the joke “you can leave a can here we will take care of it” I would not have had to work there anymore. Together this job is tough, and  alone nearly impossible. This driver thought that he was above all the carrying and shuffling around and he just didn’t give a damn about anything that needed to be done. He would just delegate those tasks as if he was owning the place.

You probably think, why do you accept this and why don’t you complain to your boss about it? Well I did confront my boss about it and well… That’s how I ended up quitting on the before last day of the market. Something very peculiar and interesting is going on in this city. It turns out that these people “close” to my boss were all children of big Münster names. Their parents owned big companies in the city and this city has created some kind of elite for themselves. Seeing how the other girls who worked there accepted everything that happened makes me wonder how this “elite” status established itself. I talked to them and they all felt the same way and for some reason they just didn’t dare to speak up about it. I think that these “elite” children are told they are special from the moment they are born. Therefore bully their way through school and continue this behaviour when they start working. Basically this small city seems to have created a class system of its own, and the people who live there accept it.