BLOG NAME CHANGED!

Hi lovelies! Today I come to you with some pretty big news: my blog's name has changed. The URL stays the same old so no need for panic - or frankly anything from your side of the deal. So why did I change it?

If you want to do a little exercise, you can type in "Terra Incognita blog" to Google Search and see if you find me. I bet you don't. That's because there are so many blogs or travel agencies around the world with that exact name that I drown in this mess called Terra Incognitas. The domain name isn't free in any form, the blogspot URL isn't free, there's at least 5 Terra Incognita Twitter accounts... you get the drift. It wasn't original enough and seriously affected my SEO.

So we here at ex-Terra Incognita are now called The Strayling. What's that? It's a real word, believe me or not, combining the verb 'stray' with the suffix '-ling'. A strayling is someone who wanders, a drifter, the one that strays.

I have aggressively changed my social media account names today. Make sure to follow me all around internet so you won't miss the rest of my adventures! 

(If you're already following me on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest of Bloglovin', don't stress, you're still on board)

Twitter: @thestrayling

Facebook: @thestrayling

Pinterest: thestrayling

Bloglovin': The Strayling

But more importantly: I HAVE A NEW INSTAGRAM ACCOUNT! And I mean completely new. I wanted to separate my blog activities from my personal life, so go ahead and follow my new only blog-related Instagram account:

Instagram: the_strayling

I'm so excited. Are you? I hope you are! Tune in for new posts in the near future, including a fresh story in Melissa's Misadventures series - this time it's me causing public disturbance in a Hare Krishna mass....

Do you like the new name? How did you come up with your own blog name? Share your thoughts in the comments below!

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MY INTERVIEW IN LIFE IN DUBLIN

"I never felt like I left Finland because I didn’t like it – it just wasn’t enough, and spontaneously leaving everything behind to run away with a foreign guy might just have been the kick in the butt I needed.... "

Hi Lovelies! Today I come to you with more external material from the depths of the internet. Life in Dublin blog's wonderful writer Ana-Maria Hota interviewed me to give her readers more insight to the many lives of immigrants from different nationalities in Dublin.

The interview discusses my observed similarities and differences between Finland and Ireland, the craic of the Irish and even experiences of discrimination. How's the life of a Finnish emigrant in Ireland? You can read my interview here:

MY INTERVIEW IN 'LIFE IN DUBLIN'

Do you have similar thoughts about Ireland? Or did I get it all wrong? Let me know what you think in the comments below! 

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Interview in BlogExpat: Why I Hate to Love Ireland

Ireland: this damned Emerald Isle. I can sincerely admit I love to hate and hate to love my new home country. Ireland has an international reputation of being the heart of every party - always merry and always drunk. But what's the truth? How is the life in Ireland, for real?

BlogExpat approached me a few weeks back, asking if I would like to share my immigrant story on their website. Well, of course! My rants about the ups and downs of a Finnish migrant's life in Ireland is now live:

READ THE INTERVIEW HERE!

In other news regarding my presence on the world wide web, I have now officially expanded my social media cavalcade with a Twitter account. I honestly never thought this day would come, but I'm actually pretty excited about it already! It's not my personal Twitter as much as it's a platform to share my blog's content and other immigrant stories. Check it out by clicking the photo below:

It's November in Ireland and 15 °C inside: I'm currently wearing Alex's harem pants as a scarf around my neck. Desperate times ask for desperate measures. I swear I can almost see my breath!

Check out my previous interviews on other websites:

ExpatsBlog ⎮ Expat.com

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10,000 Visitors - THANK YOU! + Newsplash

Hi guys!

Today is a special day for my blog: we just hit 10,000 visitors! Ten thousand clicks on my blog posts. That's a lot of people! I know I haven't always been the most active and consistent blogger, but seeing such a number in my blog statistics makes me immensely happy.

At first I was planning on doing something special to celebrate this tiny milestone of mine, but a few failed attempts and many abandoned ideas later I came to the solution of keeping this post brief. I tried to film a little video of myself saying thank you for all of you guys in person, but no one, I mean no one has ever bothered to tell me how hideous I sound on film. In other words, you just missed your chance to witness a real documentation of my Finnish-British-Canadian-French English accent blabbering away.

So no videos this time. Instead, I wanted to take this occasion to make a few exciting announcements. As a huge SEO and blog traffic nerd I'm highly aware of the main sources of traffic on my blog, and on the top sits who else but FACEBOOK. Realizing this, I gathered all of my courage and created a Facebook page for Terra Incognita. Shoosh! Go and like it HERE!

I'm still working on it, but in the future I'd really like it if I could stop flooding my personal facebook profile with my blog updates. I would like this page created specially for my blog to be the main platform to advertise new posts to my audience. A girl can dream, right?

Speaking of traffic: I've had a chance to do some amazing collaboration with multiple expat community websites during my time as a blogger. These websites have been a huge source of traffic to my humble little blog project here, which is why I'm now ruthlessly taking this space to thank EXPAT.COM for featuring me on their website on multiple occasions.

The support of others is of top-tier importance for any immigrant, which is why communities like these can turn out to be incredibly helpful when you're sad and alone in a new country, feeling helpless, sitting in your new apartment and eating pot noodles for a week straight since you were too scared to buy anything else from the grocery store.

The community on Expat.com Canada was fairly active, but the folk on the Ireland community still seem to be lost in the winds of the Emerald Isle. So all my fellow expats in Ireland, go and make friends there! Forum discussions, job boards and blog directories are waiting to be discovered. I regularly get messages from people asking for advice on things like immigration processes, housing and job search in Canada and Ireland, and I find it incredibly exciting to be able to help others battling with those same piles of forms and documents as I have in the past.

I actually have much bigger and more exciting news to share with you in the near future, but let's keep a bit of mystery for a little while longer. In the meantime I promise to have a more consistent and regular posting schedule - I have a million drafts in Work In Progress state at this very moment! Stay tuned for city guides for Toronto and Ottawa, my ultimate guide for a successful Long Distance Relationship and a lovely tour around my ancient, world-renown university, Trinity College Dublin....

What kind of posts would you like to read in the future? Suggestions, ideas, feedback warmly welcome! Let me know what you think in the comments below! 

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