THE LAST LAP: Zürich-München-Paris-London-Colombo

CONFESSIONS OF A GLOBAL GYPSY

By Dr. Chandana (Chandi) Jayawardena DPhil
President – Chandi J. Associates Inc. Consulting, Canada
Founder & Administrator – Global Hospitality Forum
chandij@sympatico.ca

The last lap of our six-week-long adventure in the midst of a brutal winter included my solo brief visits to a few cities in Switzerland. We also visited one city in West Germany and visited the capital of France, before returning to the United Kingdom. Soon after ending the trip, I needed to focus on re-commencing my career in hospitality management. The last week of the trip went fast.

Brig

I left my friend’s house in Zug early in the morning to catch a train to the Swiss capital city, Bern. I did a brief walk around this city which I had visited three years prior. My train from Bern to Brig took a little over two hours. Dr. Wolfgang D. Petri, the president of Hotelconsult (now, César Ritz Colleges Switzerland) was at the Brig train station to welcome me.

In 1982, he opened the first hotel school in Brig as part of the Hotelconsult Management Company. Soon afterwards, I secured a contract for our family business – Streamline Services, as their student recruitment agency in Sri Lanka. The school expanded rapidly. I was invited to spend a couple of days with Hotelconsult. “Welcome to Brig! Thank you very much for recruiting Sri Lankan students who are doing well here,” Dr. Petri said.

After a quick tour of their main campus in Brig, he hosted me, six of the Lankan students there and four of their Swiss lecturers to lunch at the training restaurant. They maintained very high standards. After lunch I attended a faculty meeting. Then he took me on a 30-minute drive to their new, second campus in a nearby village – Lax. This is the most beautiful location of a hotel school I have ever seen.

Since the opening of the oldest and the best-known hotel school in the world – École Hôtelière de Lausanne (EHL) in 1893, Switzerland created a reputation as the Mecca of hospitality management education in the world. In the early 1980s, a few Swiss hotel schools commenced programs in English to appeal to a wider canvas. Dr. Petri was one of those leaders who created a new, international vision for the Swiss hospitality management education.

During the return drive from Lax to Brig, Dr. Petri briefed me about their plans to launch Switzerland’s first Bachelor of Arts program in Hotel Management in partnership with Washington State University in USA in 1985. I was very impressed with Dr. Petri’s vision, his focus on student success, his ambition for the school and his passion for excellence. He was an inspiration to me. The seed he planted in my mind that day resulted in creating the first international hotel school in Sri Lanka, with myself as the founding Managing Director in 1991.

Next morning, I was invited to deliver a guest lecture, which was popular with the students. Six years later, I realized that my 1985 guest lecture in Switzerland was also popular with the Swiss lecturers at Hotelconsult. One of them, Heinz Buerki, left Hotelconsult to set up a competitor hotels school – IMI International Management Institute near Lucerne, Switzerland, in 1991. Soon after that, he contacted me and appointed me a Visiting Professor of IMI. I did two teaching contracts in Switzerland in 1992 and 1993. IMI also appointed our family business – Streamline Services — as the exclusive student recruiting agency for IMI in Sri Lanka.

When I look back, I realize that I have been fortunate to get such opportunities around the world to open doors for further progress. In 2013, as the Associate Dean of the largest faculty for Hospitality Management and Culinary Arts in Canada, I signed an education pathway agreement between my employer, George Brown College and IMI. When Heinz Buerki met me in Toronto for that, he fondly remembered our long-established professional relationship since 1985.

I am not surprised that as of 2022, César Ritz Colleges Switzerland is ranked sixth in the world (just behind Lausanne, UNLV, SHMS, Glion and Les Roches) among the best hospitality and leisure schools, according to the QS World University Rankings. I am happy that I was able to make a small contribution to their success for a few years from their inception, 40 years ago.After two days in Brig, I took an early morning train to Lausanne with a short sight-seeing stop in a small town of 750 residents – Fiesch. I had breakfast there and reached Lausanne for lunch and a city tour. After that I took a three-hour train ride to Luzern, In time for a late dinner and overnight stay.

Next morning, I explored Luzern, a city which I visited several times in later years, during my teaching stints at IMI in the early 1990s in a nearby village – Weggis, in the canton of Lucerne. My first visit to Luzern was memorable. For fun, I crossed the river four times using the famous bridges of Luzern, including the Kapellbrücke (or the Chapel Bridge) a beautiful, covered, wooden footbridge spanning the river Reuss diagonally.

Next day I travelled to München in West Germany with an interesting stop in the largest city in Switzerland. Although my stop in Zürich was short, I was happy to visit the capital of the canton of Zürich, for the first time. Zürich is a hub for railways, roads, and air traffic. Both Zurich Airport and Zürich’s main railway station are the largest and busiest in the country. It was a cold day with snow and rain, but I did a walk around in the heart of the city to get a quick impression.

When I arrived in München in the evening, I was given a warm welcome by my wife, her mother and our West German family friends, Angelika and Gerhard. They insisted that we have a formal dinner in their house. It had been three years since we met them in München and five years since they last visited us in Sri Lanka when they did a special trip to attend our wedding in 1980. It was very nice catching up. Angelika worked as a flight attendant for Lufthansa Airline and Gerhard had a busy practice as a corporate lawyer.

As we visited most of the key attractions of München during the last visit, our hosts took us to an attraction we had missed the previous time – the Deutsches Museum, that had been established in 1903. We loved the main site of the Museum, which was on a small island in the Isar river. It had been used for rafting wood since the Middle Ages. This is the world’s largest museum of science and technology, with over 25,000 exhibited objects from 50 fields of science and technology. It receives nearly 1.5 million visitors per year. For a period of time the museum was also used as a venue to host pop and rock concerts.

We left München around 7:00 am and the train took 10 hours to reach our last key destination – Paris. We found an inexpensive, old hotel near the Gare de l’Est, one of the six large, mainline railway station terminals in Paris. We were happy with the room rate of FF150, but then they charged another FF70 for us to use the bathroom facilities!

As it was our fifth visit to Paris, we had previously seen most of the key tourist attractions there. After one of the most brutal, winter storms, the weather in France had improved and the snow had melted. We took the metro to the city centre and visited Palais Garnier, built in 1875 for the Paris Opera. We then walked along the beautifully illuminated Rue de la Paris – a fashionable shopping street in the centre of Paris and Boulevard des Capucines. As it was my mother-in-law’s first visit to Paris, the next day we did a three-hour city tour and re-visited the Eiffel Tower and Arc de Triomphe.

There is no better place than Paris to end a memorable, lengthy trip of Europe. Three years after that, in 1988, my employer then – Le Meridien hotel company owned by Air France, sent me for advanced, management training in Paris and Tours. I love visiting Paris.

After two days In Paris, we took a night coach around 9:00 pm. We arrived in Amiens around 1:00 am and then reached Boulogne-Sur-Mer around 3:00 am, to catch our ferry to Dover. In the ferry we analysed our last six weeks of travelling to 17 European countries. During that short period of time, my wife had visited 34 cities and I had visited 45 cities. To do that we travelled around 300 hours in trains, ferries and coaches. We were a little over budget and had spent a total of £1,500 including the cost of food. Still, it was a shoe-string budget, money well spent.

We concluded that the most pleasant surprises during the trip were Oporto and Budapest, and the most beautiful cities we ever visited were Venice and Paris. Around seven in the morning, we reached our favourite city in the world – London.

London was cold, rainy and snowy, but we were happy to be back. My wife went to work on the same day, and I had scheduled a few job interviews the very next day. The uncertainty of what the future held for us added to the sense of adventure during our long trip.Now it was the decision time, for a stable future. Having gained a long list of academic and professional qualifications and a wide range of experiences in most of the five-star hotels in the United Kingdom since 1983, I was optimistic.

We were prepared to go anywhere in the world, if I could secure a good job fulfilling my next two career goals. I was targeting to become the Food & Beverage Manager of a large, five-star international hotel by age 31. Then, after a few years, become the General Manager of such a hotel by age 34.

However, I was not successful in finding a suitable management position in any British company. I felt that earning the first ever MSc in International Hotel Management went against my suitability for certain jobs. The Vice Presidents who interviewed me in London, felt that I was over-qualified! In a hands-on industry, such as hoteliering, companies were not used to managers with master’s degrees. That was then, but 37 years later, today, having a master’s degree is fast becoming a prerequisite for an international hotel manager.

One Director of the Trust House Forte head office in London who interviewed me for the post of Food & Beverage Manager of their five-star hotel in Amman, Jordan, gave me a very practical suggestion. He said, “Why don’t you go back to Sri Lanka and attempt to join a five-star, international hotel there? After a couple of years’ management experience in a five-star hotel there, you should be able to launch your international hotel management career.”

I was disappointed when I was not hired for the job, but I took his advice seriously. Within a week, we packed our bags and left England to re-settle in Sri Lanka in search of a suitable opportunity to earn my Return on Investment (ROI) in Continuous Professional Development (CPD).

Colombo

Early morning

All are still sleeping

The house in total silence

The gate creaks as I leave home

To explore a city, I missed dearly

Good morning, sir, greets the neighbourhood thug

I commence a long nostalgic walk

Towards my alma mater

A Buddhist sermon in Pali on a radio played loudly

A Hindu mantra from a worshipper outside a kovil

An Arabic prayer from a nearby mosque

While a bell rings at an adjoining church

Gradually, the road gets louder

With sounds of crows, stray dogs, and tuk tuks

A bus conductor announcing next stops

Horns of cars stuck in a crazy traffic jam

A policeman loudly blows his whistle

School girls giggle near a crowded bus stand

A woman sweeping pavements while chatting

A devotee uttering gathas while worshipping a Bo tree

A beggar begging for a coin or two

A sweep ticket seller screaming for last day sales

A mother talks to a child in Sinhala

A boy yells at a buddy in Tamil

Two executives talk in English

A vendor speaks broken English trying to close a sale

All blend fleetingly like a symphony

But, unconducted

The scent of tea when passing an eating house

The aroma of sambar gravy when passing a thosai spot

The smell of freshly baked bread when passing a bakery

The perfume of joss sticks when passing a temple

The fragrance of flowers when passing a flower shop

Bring back memories from my good old school days

All seems to blend well in a city

Now more diverse than ever before

Giving a true cosmopolitan feel

Still a poor city with plenty security barriers

To protect from periodical terrorist attacks

Now back in my home town for good or bad

Nice to travel the world

Yet, there is no better place

Other than my birth place

Always there waiting patiently

Like a loving mother

To welcome me back

I simply love

My Colombo …