About Me

My name is Simiao and welcome to my travel blog!

I was born and grew up in Beijing. After getting my undergraduate degree, I came to the U.S. for graduate school. After that, I worked as a Mandarin teacher in PreK-12 schools in Chicago and Southern California for seven years. At the beginning of 2018, I quit my job, returned to China, and solo traveled for almost a year. In 2019, I came back to U.S., worked and lived in the Bay Area of Northern California for three years. I started working online in July 2022, decided to quit my full-time job, and moved to Mexico a month later to mainly improve my Spanish. I ended up living and traveling in Mexico for 5 months. Currently I'm based in Chicago, Illinois.

I enjoy meeting new people with diverse cultural backgrounds and making meaningful connections. I enjoy cooking and eating food from every part of the world. I also like hiking, working out, and running, so that I can burn more calories to eat more food. :-) I become more and more minimalistic as I travel more.

Since the year of solo traveling, I have been documenting my travel journey and adventures, and consistently sharing them with my family and friends on WeChat. Many family and friends told me that my solo travel experience is truly inspirational and they were always looking forward to my WeChat posts. They encouraged me to start a blog, but I didn’t have the time while traveling, and wasn’t able to do so until COVID hit, when I had more time to go through all the old photos and posts to catch up with all my previous trips.

I write this blog to document my travel journey, especially the stories of the people I met. Hope to share them with more people and inspire more people to travel more and experience the beauty of this world and the kindness of humanity.