The Magic Term

This past week, I’ve been working on a piece for this Sunday’s Writers’ Group. I’m writing an expansion of a recent blog post about how I became a YouTube fanatic.

I’m at that point I always reach, where the whole idea of the piece seems dull and stupid, and I want to abandon it, and, at the same time, the whole idea of the piece seems interesting and exciting, and I can’t wait to share it with the group.

Last month, when Writers’ Group was just Barbara and me, and neither one of us had written anything, and we spent a lovely afternoon, just the two of us chatting, Barbara seemed interested in what I’d been finding on YouTube. So, I’ll keep going on the piece I’m writing. Besides, no one has ever been kicked out of Writers’ Group for writing something dull and stupid.

In the piece so far, I’ve discovered the genre of “foreigner living in Japan” YouTube channels. I’ve written that I’m sure there are genres of expats living in other counties as well, but I had yet to discover the right search engine term to find them.

(I’ve tried many variations of “expat living in [name of country]” or “my life in [name of country]”, but nothing showed me the vlogs I was looking for. Rather than personal stories of expats, I kept getting commercial travel guides.)

Suddenly, this morning, before I left for work, the magic term came to me. I searched for: best vlogs by expats.  (In hindsight, it seems obvious.) I found exactly what I’d been looking for. As I suspected, there are foreigners living in counties other than Japan, and they’re posting their lives onto YouTube.

From the lists I’ve found, I decided to check out a channel named “Eight Miles from Home”. (I don’t know what the title means, but I love it.) A British couple is raising a baby in Portugal. They post vlogs about their life. It seems that they lived in Thailand for a while, before Portugal, and posted vlogs from there as well. That’s about all I know right now. I’ve subscribed to their channel, but it’s too soon to know if I’ll stick with them.

Here’s a video they uploaded today:

(Now I have to decide if I want to rewrite part of my piece, or keep going with the idea that I haven’t found the correct search term yet.)