Do you really speak Swedish?
I was admiring the pretty blonde girl greeting us at the reception in Lyon, France. Not only was she born in Sweden, she did in fact speak fluent French and English.
Dressed in a smart dark blue uniform the friendly receptionist greeted us with a big smile as we turned up to check in at the Radisson hotel for the night.
Wow, that is so cool! I want to be just like you when I grow up! I blurted the words out. I couldn't be more impressed. It was the summer of 1987 and I had just turned 10 years old.
Being from a typical middle class Swedish family our summer holidays normally consisted of the occasional trip to the south coast of Sweden or perhaps to the sand dunes of Denmark. Most typically we would move out to our summer house for the 2 months long school holiday. Our summer house was a picturesque cute red house made of wood with white painted corners, located in the middle of nowhere on the country side with half a mile to the closest neighbor, but with the plus of having a beautiful coast nearby.
Our 1 hour journey to the summer house was like a scene from a comedy sitcom:
My chain smoking father at the wheel, driving way too fast and annoying us all with the speed and his cigarette smell, profoundly proud of driving his grey Saab 900 Turbo. In the front seat next to him was my mother, stressed about trying to organize all of us in the car and with a tray of 20 plants in her lap for the summer house garden.
In the back seat was my annoying older brother and myself. I had my pet rabbit in her large pink cage in my lap, a 3 gallon orange water bucket between my legs with my pet water turtle splashing around, gasping for air.
In the middle between myself and my brother was our black heavily overweight cat, who just like myself suffered badly from motion sickness, which resulted into my father having to stop every 20 minutes on our journey since either I or the cat felt sick!
But not the summer of 1987. My father was a camera man for a television channel in Sweden and he was an experienced traveler having to film numerous documentaries in his life in remote places like Russia, Ukraine and Madeira. So he decided that this summer was the time to take the whole family on a road trip all the way to the south of France. Our goal was Perpignan on the south coast where we had rented an apartment for 7 days. We had planned to stop overnight at a camping site in Germany and at the Radisson hotel in Lyon on our way through Europe.
Did I forget to mention I stood out like a sore thumb in my family? I seriously used to accuse my mom of having an affair with the postman! My parents and my brother all had dark hair and olive skin and covered themselves in oily sun factor 4 on the sunny beach.
Myself? I was and still am whiter than milk, with blonde hair. The sun turns me occasionally into some kind of red lobster, though I never have the luck of going brown. So our week on the beach in Perpignan was my family's dream where they could stretch out in swimwear on the sun beds. Whilst I was wearing sun factor 50 and covered myself under my dad's old white shirt to avoid getting burned. I still wonder what planet they adopted me from!
So my goal was set on a career in hotels after that initial brief visit in Lyon, and though it was always in the back of my mind as I got older, I have to confess I sometimes got off the track a bit...
As a teenager I wanted to become a farmer, then a photographer, then a journalist, then a language specialist and so on... Eventually when I got to the age of 18 I decided that a tourism education at a not too distant college was the right path for me.
So here I am, around 20 years later...
My path took me after college to be a nanny in Long island, NY, where I funny enough fell in love with someone from the United Kingdom. I therefore decided to get a job within the aviation industry at Heathrow airport. That lead to numerous positions in the hospitality and hotel industry and by the age of 27 I had my first General Manager position at a small 3 star hotel in central London.
Restless and ambitious, I always strived for more, so after a few GM roles at 5 star hotels and Director positions for hotel management companies, I today spend my time as an asset manager and owners representative for a number of luxury hotels.
I guess I have my father to thank for it all -- for meeting that inspirational young lady in Lyon in 1987.
I guess we can say that hospitality was my first real love in life and indeed if you have caught that love bug, you can never really get rid of it!