And hello, Steemit community!
It’s always difficult for me to write this first post, wherever I start writing!
What you need to know for now is that I’m Laura Dali, and that I come from a beautiful little banana country from the Balkans.
I am an English graduate with both BA and MA with honours in English philology, with a major in translation and interpreting, and a minor in teaching.
I used to work, and work at the moment, again, as an English teacher at both primary and secondary schools, but my aspiration is to settle down at university, be it at home or abroad. I am trying to get a post at uni, however I have been unsuccessful in it so far – due to the banana country policy that governs the lives or people around me.
I enjoy translating and interpreting and do it from time to time, when people ask me to. Although this work is relatively intermittent and highly underpaid, it helps me pay the bills and sometimes fill my thin budget. This is how I am familiar with hearing impairment and hearing aids, psychology, railway reconstruction, millennials, globalisation, new media in education, teaching, canoeing, sports, physical education, brand personality, consumers self, counter ambush marketing, sustainable development, rural tourism, home décor, and many, many more.
I also used to work as a copywriter, content writer and community manager at a full-service web design agency, but got sick and tired of it due to the exploitation policy my boss based and runs his business on for years now. That is how I learn that majority of content online sucks – because it is written by people like me, just for the sake of pot boiling.
Luckily, I learnt immensely much there, mostly about myself and what I expect to get from work (other than money). Working there, I familiarized myself with Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Pinterest, Delicious, Reddit, Instagram and Google+; and used to write about IT, web and graphic design, SEO and digital marketing, social networks and community management, ultrasound scans for both men and women, real estate, waste management and equipment, medical tourism, food supplements and sports equipment, dog breeding, cycling, and the like. Additionally, as a ghost writer for black hat SEO companies, I used to write about green living, party planning, fashion and makeup, family life, health, nutrition, love, and so many, many more. Resulting from this never ending list of topics I could talk about, you can expect to read here about my experiences and knowledge gained the hard way.
In my free time, I run a local handball club’s fan website that, at one point, used to be ranked in the top 3 results in Google search, but my colleagues and I had to invest a lot of time, effort, skills and knowledge into achieving it. I still write for it, yet not as often as before, because since I moved to another town I now rarely visit the games.
Long time ago, when blogging was not the IT thing that everyone knew about, I started (and closed) several blogs in some local platforms, then moved to Google’s blog, and stuck with WordPress as it provides the most to me as the end user. What is interesting about these is that I used to play in HTML long before I knew what it was called or what its purpose was.
I intend writing about my travelling around Europe, because so far I’ve been to Greece, Macedonia, Bulgaria, Croatia, Montenegro, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Italy, Hungary, Germany, Poland, the Netherlands, Belgium, and I am quite sure there’s at least one country I forgot to mention. Most of these journeys were either completely free, or I paid very little for them, so this is where you could learn how to get to travel the world for free – if you are able to extract the point behind my writing.
Other than that, let’s see where this thing goes and if I am able to make some use of it.