Inside Asian Gaming

IAG MAY 2022年5月 亞博匯 86 school until it became quite difficult, and then I moved to The Hague. Although I started playing in The Hague area as well, it’s just not something I could keep up with as a student. It was just too demanding. Also, if I was not deejaying, I was working in restaurants, washing dishes and helping in the kitchen, waiting tables on weekends and during vacations. That was really good fun because when you finished work you were done, so you could go home and have a blast with your friends. Nowadays, even when you finish work you are still working, or at least thinking about work. OG: Is that how your career in hospitality began? RV: Actually, when I was doing all my stuff at high school it was not my plan to have a career in hospitality. I wanted to go more into business and trade, but somehow I got interested when my mother said, “Why don’t you go to hotel school?” The service industry is very interesting and you don’t need to work in a hotel – the study is very wide. It’s about business and marketing, service and so forth. I was lucky to get into the hotel school in The Hague, which is not a very practical hotel school in terms of learning how to serve or cook but is really on the management side. It's a business administration hotel school, and I decided, “Okay, I would like to work in the hotel business.” I was also very lucky with my apprenticeships while at the hotel school. That really motivated me to be where I am today. OG: How did you come to be working in Macau and what attracted you to come here? RV: In 1985 I wanted to go to a nice place for my management training, and my relatives advised me to go to the Oriental Hotel in Bangkok. But in those days none of the students would ever go to Asia for training, so I was the first one. I had to fight for it, actually, because the hotel school did not want me to go that far away. The Oriental Hotel in those days was one of the leading hotels in the world. That’s where I got a taste of the East and I really loved it. INDUSTRY PROFILE