Hi, I am Kimi! 😁
Would it be too much if I explain my entire life-story?
Probably…
I’ll try to keep it short. Although we are not meant to live in the past nor dream of the future, (Buddha: “Do not dwell in the past, do not dream of the future, concentrate the mind on the present moment.”) I will be addressing my past, presence and future.
Starting with the past, I was born on a rainy Friday the 13th, in February 1998 to be exact. The local time of my birth in Germany was 6:20 pm. At the age of 10, my parents (Mum: German, Dad: Turkish) decided that we will move to Turkey (Fethiye/Yaniklar). I did not speak Turkish and had to learn it from scratch since my dad had been living in Germany from the age of 5. I’ll admit, It was tough! But it build my character and made me the person I am today. After 5 years in Turkey, my parents surprised me with a year abroad in England. Well… one year turned in to three. After I finished my GCSE’s in year 11, I decided to finish college in the UK to avoid repeating the year in Germany. I attended the Sixth Form my school used to offer studying Travel & Tourism, Health & Social Care and Dance. After completing my courses with 420 Ucas points, I got accepted by the number one university for International Hospitality and Tourism Management (University of Surrey). Here I continued my passion for dance through the K-Pop Dance society and also picked up some new interests through the Jiujitsu, Bulgarian Folk dance, Japanese and Ice Skating society where I was also elected to the Social Media and Marketing position. Besides my many hobbies at university, my main passion was missing! Traveling! So I spend a semester studying in Melbourne, Australia where I came further out of my comfort zone. To give you an idea: I hitchhiked in Tasmania where I also stayed in a strangers house for free through Couchsurfing, cuddled some wallabies on the way and I got bitten by a Koala. But there are many more stories to tell from my Exchange Semester in Australia. Additionally, I spend one month in New Zealand where I lived a primitive, minimalistic and zero-waste lifestyle on an island called Waiheke. I was fascinated by the variety of different lifestyles I came across in different countries so far, which pushed me to travel to China to learn about their culture and daily habits since China always appeared to be the most exotic and foreign country to me. After having spent a total of 3 months traveling through China, I was convinced to learn the most spoken language on the planet! So, in my final year of university, I successfully completed Mandarin Level 1 with a total of 86 marks out of 100.
Moving on, I am currently 21 years old and recently graduated from the University of Surrey. I aim to proceed learning Chinese in my spare time without tutoring. Additionally, I started the TEFL (Teaching English as a Foreign Language) course online which further enables me to travel to new countries in order to teach people English! During the completion of this 6 months course, I’m spending some time in Spain to visit my parents who moved here recently and hey maybe I can pick up some Spanish too! During all these tasks I still aim to upload content for my YouTube channel and instagram account.
Finally, my Dreams & Goals will probably carry on changing on a regular basis. However, my all-time consistent goal is to travel to every single country in the world before I die (yes, including North Korea, Syria etc.). My dream being linked to my goal, is to take home knowledge, culture and linguistic skills from each of these places and implement those in my own life.