Blogging while abroad

The internet is a great way to keep in touch with friends and family while you're abroad. Social networking sites like Facebook and Myspace have made it so easy to know what's going on at home, it sometimes feels as though you haven't even left home. I think that it's really important to make a chronicle of one's adventures, instead of just sending sporadic e-mails and Facebook messages to friends, why not make a blog for everyone to read?

Before I went for my year in Japan, I designed a blog and put it on my PSU personal web space. Weblogs are easy to come by, there are free services like Blogger.com and Livejournal, to name a few, that offer pre-made layouts and easy publishing for those of us who are maybe slightly impaired when it comes to the arts of web design. I set it up with links to my host school and of course resources for study abroad at Penn State and also for people interested in Japan. I even had a strip of pictures that would update as I added new ones to my Flickr account. I would try to post at least once a week, but it was kind of hard, especially since I didn't want to spend all of my time studying abroad in Kansai Gaidai's computer lab. My family would visit my blog and see what I'd been up to that week, and they could also see my photos, since everything was in one easily accessible location.

Blogging while abroad was definitely a great way to recount my experience, and now I have all of these blog posts I can go back and read and remember my travels. You can read them too, at my site: http://www.personal.psu.edu/bmb5015

Actually, people have found my site while doing searches for information on traveling in Japan, and have e-mailed me with questions about the specific regions that I lived in and visited during my year there. I was also contacted by a former student of Kansai Gaidai who lived with my same homestay family! You never know who is out there reading your stuff, so make it good, and believe me you will be in for a memorable experience!

Posted by Bridget, Osaka, Japan, Academic Year 2006-2007