about

I am standing in Cajón del Maipo, Chile, twenty-two years old, in front of a small ocean-blue pond surrounded by snow-covered mountains.

In the vastness, something shifts inside me, silently and permanently.

I am small in it, and part of it.

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I'm Zaza. Berlin raised me. Switzerland challenges me. Spain is where I am going.

In 2022, my partner and I traveled through seven countries and witnessed what tourism does when no one is paying attention. In Costa Rica, the Monteverde cloud forest felt full and abundant, until I learned how much was already lost. At Lake Titicaca, the Uru people welcomed visitors even as the line between cultural preservation and cultural loss had long since blurred. In Menorca and Portugal, locals found themselves priced out of their own streets, their homes turned into short-term rentals for people who do not stay.

An industry promising regeneration for some, while systematically destroying what it depends on.

For sixteen years I have worked inside hospitality, watching conversations turn into friendships, strangers become regulars, a room become a second living room. For two years, my partner and I managed a restaurant in Berlin that felt like home.

Tables bring people together. When a space is created with soul, it opens something that might not have found its way elsewhere. A taste of possibility.

The systems we build shape how we see and listen — to land and to each other.

This is what I write toward: relearning how to live in the places that hold us.

Between Three Minds follows these questions through place, hospitality systems, and human behavior.

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I write for people who work in hospitality and travel and genuinely love it — who know the industry has to change and are still looking for their own agency inside that knowledge. Who have not yet traded the love for cynicism, but need a place to think.

If that is you, stay.

— Zaza