When I finished high school, I moved to Budapest to learn instrument manufacturing. I was there for about two and a half years, and during that time I lived in a hostel. There, I discovered my passion for that lifestyle, because it suits me as I consider myself an introvert. There you meet people with different qualities, and you will always find people that fit with you. I always felt out of place, but in a hostel, I found myself feeling comfortable in a social situation for the first time. In hostels, nobody knows anything about anyone, so you've got no reason to feel inferior. We’re all equal inside a hostel.

At the time, I was playing in a Blues band. One day I talked with one of my partners and we decided to open a hostel in Budapest. It was great but also exhausting, because a place like this in a city like that means no rest. After three years, I found myself in a teahouse in Budapest, where I discovered a whole new culture for young people, university students that made their nightlife inside a teahouse, instead of drinking. Seeing that people met and talked to each other so nicely made me think “whoa, this is exactly what I want”. I then realized that we had nothing like that on England, where I’m from.

I talked to my brothers and we decided to run the project. The first thing I had to do, was learn everything regarding tea. So I traveled to India for about a year, staying in plantations and getting all the knowledge I could. Then, I hired different suppliers in Germany and India. Once the hard part of the project was covered, it was time to focus on the place itself. That’s how my brothers and I opened our teahouse. It’s actually been successful, maybe because despite my brothers and I being very different to one another, we complement each other. That was another amazing and exhausting experience that pushed me to try something totally different.

My parents are very entrepreneurial, I think that if they were born in this context, with all the advantages we have (like Internet, cheap travel, less social pressure for marriage or having kids) they could have done greater things. My dad’s a musician and collaborates with the community, and my mother supports them too, as she sponsors many kids who have no money, and she hosts people in our house. With them, I had the first contact with hosting and I guess that’s other of the reasons why I got involved in that world in the first place.

I moved to Montenegro and with the help of a former employee from the hostel in Budapest, I bought a place. We ran a crowdfunding campaign to renovate the building and we started a new hostel project, far from the city center… and here we are.

I really like kingfishers. They have been relevant in every major decision in my life. They showed up when I was planning the teahouse with my brothers and a few times during my research in India. In the future, I want to take pictures of these birds to get a commission for the prints, and build stories based on every mission I had looking for them. With an aggressive social media campaign, I want to intertwine human and animal charity projects, because if we help people, people can then help animals.

I would like to be at the point where I’m no longer the one making things, but the one who facilitates others to do those things, through supporting, advising or financing; to enable young people who always have different ideas and are making changes in the world. This is possibly the only way I can imagine my future.