Me in 2.5 sentences

My story is the classical I-took-my-midlife-crisis-early-to-pursue-a-life-of-passion-story (that’s a thing, isn’t it?):

A bright and upbeat young woman discovers her true love for architecture and history (what else?), turns her back on all offers of being showered in money and fame to combine her greatest talent (that would be talking) with her greatest passion (exploring city cultures), and lived happily ever after (or so she hopes).

The long story

What to say about yourself.. Well, Apparently, I’m huge nerd. Otherwise I wouldn’t have thrown away my lucrative job in marketing to become a full time tourist guide. And let’s be honest, it doesn’t come much nerdier than that. I have been in love with Vienna ever since I first moved here from the Ukraine around 15 years ago. Don’t make me bore you with the details. Let’s just say I needed a change...

I also always had a great interest in the belle arts, but, unfortunately, I never showed enough talent to pursue a fulltime career as an artist. So I went into marketing instead. Connecting with people and presenting things in their best light comes easy to me. So marketing seemed like the obvious choice. Yet, short over long it left me all oddly dissatisfied.

I turned to increasingly long explorations of the city that was now my home. Explorations that soon turned into a year spent dividing my time between work and interning at the Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna, then at then Museum für Angewandte Kunst. I was finally onto something...

I still remember the first time it dawned on me how much meaning was hiding in plain sight all around me. It was like being plunged in the rabbit hole of Alice in Wonderland. Learning about the history and conflicts that shaped my environment was like learning to see for me. Suddenly, the bland loud city life, the background static of our ordinary lives was filling up with life itself.

Needless to say, I was hooked.

But as much as I love the process of discovering and learning, what really gets me off is to share the discovering with other people. I want to pull them into the rabbit hole if you so want. Get them hooked on discovering as well.

Now I do that for a living.

I help people discover my favorite city and when I do a good job, I turn them into explorers in their own right.

‍