It is my pleasure to welcome Dr Natalia Alvarez as our guest for this CSD Educators blog. This is actually a welcome back, as Natalia was a guest editor for the CCDC in 2016, talking about the OpenLab in Uruguay. In this blog instead, Natalia will talk to us about her journey in crystallography, how she first met the CSD (spoiler: it was not love at first sight!), her contribution in regional crystallography schools with insights on how to teach the use of crystallographic databases, in particular the CSD.