Hell in the Kitchen, Kitchen in the Hell

Kitchen is very interesting phenomena in student's life. For example in my accommodation, there is one kitchen for 16 people. 16 responsible, adult people, without their parents, but with cleaning responsibility on their own. So of course, there are some troubles coordinating all of the cleaning processes.
Kitchen is connected with common room. It is the place where all of the people from their single rooms have the opportunity to meet each other, to talk, to watch TV, to invite friends, have dinner together and just enjoy free time. So it is lovely place with huge potential. On the other hand, it would require us to keep it nice and clean for such usage. And that's a hard job :D.
Once a week a cleaning lady came, washed floor and surfaces, but to get to surface, she needed to take all of the clean and dirty dishes from all the 3 sinks and 3 ovens and put them on our dining table. There it kept piling and it took often whole week to make the table empty again. But in the meantime dishes were piling up also in sinks and then "cleaning lady" came :D. It was like Don Quijote is fighting the wind mills. Probably the only working system would be if everybody would wash the dishes immediately and also dry it and put back to place. But many people didn't have their own dish towel for very long time, including me and then the work ended with just washing dishes, but not putting them back in their place. That meant there were some clean dishes, but every newly washed dish was put on top of the old ones, which made them wet again and it kept piling up again. In the meantime there were still dirty dishes in the sinks, which weren't washed at all. When you wanted to cook, you needed to go through all of these piles and dirty dishes in sinks to find the things you needed to cook your dinner.

One of the smaller piles

Part of the dish pile is also fancy plant

Interesting strategy to do their dishes used by some was washing dishes, but putting them in place without drying them, or just putting them back into cupboards still dirty. Some people were trying to fight the desperate situation and sometimes wash at least few more pieces of dishes than their own. Others even washed everything in the kitchen, just to enjoy the place cleaned until next meal time came.  Well.. there was 16 different people, 7 different nationalities. And that means very different approaches to practically anything. And nobody wants to behave like mom of 16 adult people. So communication about our situation was not sufficient.
When I firstly came to my university accommodation, the kitchen was filled with funny pictures and memes. Like Martin Luther King saying "I have a dream that one day people will wash their dishes" and similar visionary pictures and quotes. That was funny. After few days and first complete cleaning by some anonymous savior whole kitchen was cleaned also from these pictures and we were just instructed not to be shame for our country and to behave like adults. It is sad that neither of these strategies was working. And it was getting worse and worse throughout semester. One of the worst days I took my parents for dinner to my accommodation. And it was a bit sad feeling, seeing my mom watching me to go through the piles, looking for pot, plates and cutlery, washing everything and only then starting to cook. My mom was really surprised we can survive this in long term and that we don't have problems with infections :D. What to say.. we are young and strong :D.

Motto of the day:
1. Martin Luther King had dreams.
2. Some of them were fulfilled.
3. Obviously it is easier to fight racism than dirty dishes.