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About Me — Stela Gineva
An immigrant, a journalist, an explorer
I’ve lived in four countries across two continents and I’ve travelled to many more. I was born in Bulgaria, a tiny, insignificant post-communist Eastern European nation. It’s insignificant to everyone else. I happen to love the place.
I moved to the United Arab Emirates with my parents when I was 10. I didn’t speak a word of English prior to this. I lived in Dubai until I finished high school and then went to a liberal arts college in the Netherlands where weed is legal.
I spent my days studying international law, journalism and philosophy. I spent my evenings smoking weed, discussing Descartes, writing letters to war-criminals and attending live jazz shows. When I felt particularly pretentious, I watched Woody Allen films and discussed them with my friends.
I graduated and worked for a non-profit and made friends and fell in love, had my heart broken, and then decided I needed to be a journalist. I moved to the United Kingdom and went to the number one journalism school in the country and got a regional journalism job in what was probably the whitest county in England.
I was miserable at first and then I started working for a newspaper and I fell in love with print journalism. It was a doomed love affair because print journalism is a…