Yesterday we passed another milestone: we reached 100 countries where our blog has been read.  This is a proof-positive of the global nature of our lives today as well as the wide reach of social media and the scale of blog platforms such as WordPress that are used literally all over the world.  For the record, our 100th country was Armenia, the former Soviet republic tucked between Turkey, Georgia, Iran and Azerbaijan.  Without question, this new reader was not our first ethnic Armenian as many countries (including the United States) are home to Armenians.  And we know for a fact that our good friend Vadim has read the blog.  But we are grateful to Armenia for getting us to this surprising milestone and we look forward to seeing how many of the world’s other 96 countries we can penetrate.  Here are some fun facts about the 100 countries in which our blog has been read:

1. The United States accounts for about 75% of our total views.  This is expected given that we are in the US and we write our blog in English.
2. The United Kingdom is our second largest readership base – also expected given the language in which the blog is written.  The fact that the blog is read in so many other countries is a reflection of how ubiquitous English has become we suppose.
3. Croatia accounts for our third-largest viewership among the 100 countries.  We did go to Croatia late last year and some of our most memorable posts have been about that trip.  (A link to our last post from that trip is here: Croatia blog post).
4. Of the 100 countries, there are only two with which we were not previously familiar:  Mauritius and Cape Verde.  Thanks for the 5 views from Mauritius, we now know that it is a tiny island east of Madagascar.  As for Cape Verde, it is also a tiny island, but this one is off of the northwest coast of Africa.
5. Our very latest new viewer comes from the Palestinian Territories which comprise Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem.  Because we are sticklers we are not counting this as 101 because the Territories are not a country.  But there are over 4 million residents there and we look forward to more readers there.
6. Six out of the seven continents are covered – North America, South America, Europe, Asia, Africa and Australia.  We have not recorded any readers in Antarctica and we may never do so.  The way IP addresses are recorded is generally by country and Antarctica is the one continent that has no countries.
7. We have only visited 25 of the 100 countries that read our blog.  Clearly we have to crank up our travel plans for the future!
8. Virtually all of the countries in which the blog has been read permit the consumption of alcohol.  However, there are two (Bangladesh and Saudi Arabia) that do not permit alcohol to be consumed, and we are grateful to our intrepid readers in those countries.
9. Seven readers have been identified as being from the European Union, which is also not a country so not counted as one of our 100.  But it did cause us to do some research and we learned that occasionally IP addresses will identify generically as “EU” when people are working in headquarters locations.
10. Our final, and perhaps most important fun fact, is that wine is something that people all over the world have interest in regardless of the political structure in that country, dominant religion or class structure.

We appreciate all of our followers and will try to keep posting interesting and meaningful stories and experiences.

John & Irene Ingersoll

June 24, 2017

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