Am I turning into a local now, referring to The King Edward Hotel as the King Eddy?

At 0800 on the nose I entered the lobby to meet with the Japanese family I am looking after during their brief stay in Toronto. I informed them that the King Eddy was popular among businesspeople for breakfast meetings before work. Indeed, there was a job interview being conducted over bacon and eggs at the table directly beside us. I could hear the ambition in the interviewee’s voice as she pitched herself in the buzzwords of today’s marketing strategies.

(For the last 10 years I’ve known about the King Eddy because one of our TD clients at the company I was working for always had his regular client meetings there at 7:45 in the morning. Which was brutal considering my boss, who’d arrived the night before from Vancouver, lived on Pacific Time (-3 hours). Firing on all cylinders when your brain is expecting it to be 4:45 in the morning requires discipline and a lot of caffeine.)

In the meantime, I tried my best to communicate in the clearest English possible at a rather early hour (for me) while devouring my Swiss rosti, and planning our sightseeing for tomorrow morning. (Mmm-m-m-m, rosti — which I remarked upon after spotting it on the menu; the waiter told me the chef is Swiss.)

Before breakfast I called the tour office to confirm where the coach driver was to meet them, and he rendez-vous’ed with us promptly at 9:25 at the front entrance of the hotel. They’re off to Niagara Falls now, and we resume our whirlwind tour of Toronto in about 24 hours.

As a few (?) of you know, when I returned to Canada in 1995 from some years living overseas, I trained as a travel counsellor. I started my independent life at 18 working at a hotel in the Rocky Mountains of Alberta, but aside from an internship at a tour company after certification, I never worked in the field after that. My working life took other directions, although I’ve managed to stay in touch with the industry all these years in various ways: as an infodesk volunteer for Vancouver’s Hostelling International in the summers while at university, assisting people with their travel itineraries, encouraging people to travel, researching it and writing about it to share with other people. Travel has been a major part of my non-working life for half of my life (18 years now!); I may revisit it as Career Plan B or C or D or semi-retirement.