What the blog?

Before I started this blog, I'd toyed with the idea for a long time. I'm not sure what I was thinking about really or why I had hesitated - I guess for whatever reason the time hadn't quite been right, but in October 2013, I finally took the plunge and did it - and here we are now.

I suppose I just stopped thinking about it and debating all the pros and cons in my head, and just started writing.  So why did I do it? I enjoy writing, and apart from anything, it was a little project to keep me busy while I wasn't working. Since then, I have been pretty consistently blogging away, about whatever I feel I have something to say about that particular week.

Unless you have a blog yourself, people don't realise how much hard work and love goes into every post, let alone developing and maintaining your site. It's a labour of love. Everything takes time. It takes time to write the posts, to find, resize and upload the photos. It takes a huge amount of time to learn about how to change and fix small problems or visual details on the site. It's easy to spend hours absorbed in my laptop... If I'm not writing or tweaking the site, I'm looking for content and ideas for my Arabian Notes Facebook page, or instagramming my latest pictures, tweeting about something, chatting to someone on various social networks or learning about how to do things better on the site. So why do I put so much time and effort into it? Because, as with anything worth doing, it's worth doing well (or at the very least as well as I can!). And of course I do it because I enjoy it, and even though I am now also working full-time, it's still something I feel passionate about, and hopefully also - because you enjoy reading it.

I've been lucky enough to get those nice people over at Expats Blog to feature me in their expat blog listings for the UAE and some of you lovely people have left some very nice things to say about Arabian Notes on the page which is greatly appreciated - if anyone else would like to add to that please feel free, I'd love that! You can do so by clicking here. They've also featured an interview with me about my life in Abu Dhabi and the UAE which you can read by clicking here.

And that's not all, those equally lovely and helpful people over at Internations have kindly made Arabian Notes one of their featured blogs for the UAE. You can see that and the short bio about myself I gave them here. You can also check out the work they do and the help they offer on the subject of all things expat including networking events, online forums and more - you may find it useful if you are living overseas or are considering a move.

So other than reading this, where do you come in? Well, I LOVE to hear from you! Do get involved. Ask me questions, let me know your thoughts on what you see and read from me, whether in the comments on the blog or facebook or instagram. Come find me and say hi. Tell me what you think. And if you like what you see, please don't be shy about sharing it and telling your friends to come find me too. Do let me know what you like and what you'd be interested to see more of. I love to hear from you and it's great to have your involvement. Most of all, thank you all for reading, and I look forward to hearing from you soon.

Photo credit:How Joyful