I was lucky to be born in Montreal, Canada, a safe, multicultural and bilingual environment, a dynamic large city open to the world and to difference. There I lived a life constantly absorbed in books, in cinema, culture and antique shops, and writing, constantly writing.
Introverted, I poured my soul into listening to and editing music, and studying cinema intently. I was attracted to the occult, to magic , spirituality, graveyards. I loved herbal teas. I studied psychology, health, photography. Art for me was the Pre-Raphaelites.
I worked in that field as a counsellor with schizophrenics and clinically manic depressive people, ex-cons too, before becoming a full time film critic for over seven years for various newspapers, mainly the independent Montrewl Mirror. I learned to intimately interview a wide range of different people. I lived out my dream of plunging deeper into my beloved world of cinema and writing, meeting many of my favourite actors and directors.
I quit that to surrender to my fate by exploring and eventually moving to the land of my ancestors, Estonia. I travelled and explored tens of thousands of kilometers throughout Russia and Eastern Europe, allowing myself to be changed by this too. In order to join my two greatest passions then, writing and travelling , I wrote travel guides for The Lonely Planet for over seven years and journeyed extensively, interviewed extensively, Living with a capital L.
When that exciting chapter felt as if it were closing, I delved into what had become my greatest passions: tea and massage. I started a tea importing company in Estonia in , FirstFlush, and opened the specialist teashop Chado in I started studying Cha Dao from with Wu De at the Global Tea Hut in Taiwan and have been actively involved with them ever since, travelling extensively in Asia for tea as well. How can I combine in a concrete way my two greatest loves - tea and massage? I wondered for years, eventually realising that they are for me basically the same.
