Increasing Fame For This Site! Woo hoo!

In exactly one week, to the hour, my flight will be soaring out of Accra, Ghana and into breezy Iberia. Oh, the waterfall of emotions evoked by this thought!

After three months working in this small town in Ghana, will I be simply thrilled to stride the breezy streets of Spain without small children screaming: "White woman! Yevuuu!" every step of the way? Or will I immediately collapse into a corner of my Porto hostel, whimpering plaintively for fufu and Ghanaian friends? Stay tuned for the answer.

In the meantime, let us do a collective jig of glee to celebrate some utterly awesome milestones for this website.

1.) Oh praise the earth and the stars and all you readers! Around the World "L" has at last broken into the Top 100 Best Travel Blogs of the Net rankings!!! This has been a longtime dream of mine, and I can only hope that we will continue to soar higher and higher on the list.

How can you help attain this goal of rankings domination? Simple: The numbers are based on number of readers per day, amount of time spent on the site, number of pages clicked, and number of other sites linking in. Therefore, if you want to help us rise, read this site often, long, and deeply, and share it around with everyone you know in every way you can. And I shall thank you in Ewe, the language of Ghana's Volta Region: Akpe!

2.) The school system that so kindly employed me for five years has run a sweet little feature about this website and the Ghana Student Life Stories Project on the Boston Public Schools blog. How kind!

3.) If you have not already glanced at the lengthy interview about this site which was featured on Sharing Travel Experiences, bop over and read it right here!

So what's next for this blog? Promptly upon leaving Ghana's hair-pullingly slow internet, I have scrumptious plans to add user-friendly link buttons to the top bar of this site.

These links will increase the accessibility of the hundreds of articles about Southeast Asia, Japan, Italy, and 'Round the World Backpacking in general that are currently buried deep within this blog, unloved and rarely read. Poor little pumpkins!

Until those buttons are installed, consider taking a peek at an older article or five so they won't feel quite so neglected. Use the righthand sidebar of this page to search by Keyword, Location, Topic, or Chronology. And feel free to leave a comment on any article that moves you!

Oh, and YES, as you can see from these photos, that same herd of a hundred cattle (led by those same small, small boys who should be in school instead of working) tromped and chomped their merry way through our back yard AGAIN today! It is quite an orchestra to hear a hundred bovine mouths masticating grass, let me tell you. Mooo!