Friday, June 19, 2009

Why I write this blog

Blogger are looking for stories about people who write blogs using their service. So here goes.

As it says on the “About us” section, Pam and I retired from teaching in 2004 and decided to move to Spain. Our major concern was keeping in touch with friends and relatives back in England and so we started sending regular emails to let them know how we were going on.

Encouraged by my friend Pete, those emails became the start of a blog. The advantage of writing a blog rather than emails was that folks could dip in and out of the blog whenever they wanted. We could also write about a wider range of subjects that concerned us rather than just titbits of news..

Pretty soon others started finding their way to our blog. Many of them were English people living in Bigastro who say it a useful source of information about what is going on locally. Our new guests then passed the web address onto their friends and relatives back in England so they could also keep up with local news.

To our surprise, we then started to get visits from Spaniards. Some claimed it was a good way to help them improve their English, others just wanted an British perspective on local life.

Pretty soon, the local Town Hall picked up on my blog and not only started reading it but asked me to send the photographs I’d taken of local events to their web site. There are now hundreds of my pictures on the site for people to look at. It is a great feeling to know that we have been able to contribute in some small way to the town that has made us feel so welcome.

Our blog averages about 90 visitors a day – mostly from Spain but also from countries as far afield as America, Australia and Japan. From being a method of communicating with a hand full of folks back in England, our blog has become a daily task which we look forward to each morning.

Muchas gracias Blogger for giving us this great opportunity to integrate into the local community and make lots of new Spanish and English friends..

1 comment:

Pete said...

It's always a great read Keith, whether the posts are personal or general.

And maybe it's the reality TV effect, but the mundane stuff really does become interesting. It's nice to know what a Spanish supermarket looks like, or what the practicalities of getting power are, or even that bees in Spain look different to bees in Britain.

Keep up the good work!