{"id":4849,"date":"2013-07-01T15:09:05","date_gmt":"2013-07-01T13:09:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.msadventuresinitaly.com\/blog\/?p=4849"},"modified":"2013-07-02T17:47:44","modified_gmt":"2013-07-02T15:47:44","slug":"10-years-in-italy-and-counting","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.msadventuresinitaly.com\/blog\/2013\/07\/01\/10-years-in-italy-and-counting\/","title":{"rendered":"10 years in Italy…and counting"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Sara<\/p>\n

If you get my newsletter, you saw that I mentioned July is a big month for me.<\/p>\n

A big reason why is it marks my 10th anniversary of arriving in Italy. And 10 years that I’ve had this blog.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

If you look at my archives, though, you’ll see that they only go back to sometime in 2005, but in reality there are a few more years of posts which I wrote upon my departure to Italy. Back then, even though WordPress was only 2 months old at that time (Happy 10th to you, too!), and Blogger was a few years old and was gaining popularity, blogging wasn’t super popular, so I just\u00a0hand-coded the HTML for my website, and simulated a blog. I put my latest post up top and broke my archive pages into months. The site lived first on a subdomain of sararosso.com, then blog.sararosso.com, and then I moved it here to Ms. Adventures in Italy.<\/p>\n

At first it was just a way for me to stay in contact with my family and friends. There was no Facebook, no Twitter, no Instagram (all things I use now) and since I rarely had an internet connection, it was email or nothing. I would find an internet cafe and just say what happened that day instead of a mass email, and post a few photos if I could. Then I started getting more visitors as I started settling into life here and sharing some of the delicious things I was eating, beautiful things I was seeing, and observations about being in a different culture. Traffic grew, and I moved those earlier posts to private since they were a bit of out snyc with the rest of the site’s content.<\/p>\n

Back then, I don’t think I ever thought I would still be in Italy 10 years later (that’s me in the picture, in 2003). Or that I would still enjoy publishing on this site. Both things are still incredibly true today. And I feel lucky to have had a great 10 years of memories, experiences, and people reading and sharing their own experiences with me. I’ve met some really great people through blogging, and especially here in Italy. So I feel like I’m celebrating two anniversaries, really, and I’m happy that my site has always been with me through these interesting times.<\/p>\n

So this July is special. And I’m going to stretch out the celebration all month. I hope you’ll want to hang out with me!<\/p>\n

Here’s what I have planned this month:<\/strong><\/p>\n