Project 2 - Second Draft

During my lifetime, I have had the chance to live in many countries. I was born in Caracas, Venezuela, where I lived for the first eight years of my life. During my time in Venezuela, the situation in Venezuela regarding the economy and safety, was worsening over time. Finally, my parents decide that we were going top move to Panamá, a small country in central america. Panama was much safer and it’s economy was growing steadily, so it looked like a good place to live in. We moved to Panamá and I quickly adapted to the change. It was not too hard because in the end I was still in Latin America. There I lived for the next eight years of my life. At first, we were liking it a lot; in comparison to Venezuela, Panamá was like a first world country. But over time, my parents started seeing problems with Panamá, fraud, corruption, and the problems of a third world country. My parents the decide we had no future in Panamá, so they started looking into the immigration process needed to move to the United States. After tons of paperwork, expenses, and luck, we were granted residency in the United States.

We got to the United States in December 21 of 2015. We arrived at the Fort Lauderdale Airport, and went to our hotel. We didn't even have a house yet. Luckily, one of my uncles, Kay, owned an apartment in Fort Lauderdale, so we stayed there for a while before buying our house. Christmas went by, and New Years as well. We had a great time, and we were looking forward to our new life. However school in the United States started in August, and it was only January. Due to this, we had the idea that we could live in Germany for a few months, before school started. Germany was a good choice because we had family there, so we had people to give us a hand in case of anything. So in the end of February, we left the United States and headed to Germany.

We got to Augsburg, Germany, a place we had never been before. Many things were different. People acted differently, it was more quiet, even the smell was different. And I couldn't understand anything, everything was in German and I had no clue what anything said. We got to the apartment we had rented. It was really nice on the inside and spacious. I was starting to look forward to my stay. I settled in my room, unpacked everything and layed on the bed. It had been a long day. There, i realized there was something missing on my room, a desk. So I look around the apartment to see if I could find like a small table, or maybe even a box I could put my computer on. On the storage room, I found the pieces of a desk. I screwed the pieces together, and i put the desk in the room. I had my desk, where I was going to be spending most of my time.

A few days after we arrived I started going to a german academy to learn how to speak the language. It was exhausting because I had to wake up early and I also had to bike there, since we didn't have a car. On top of that, the clas lasted 4 hours, and it got really boring after a while. Through the whole day, I was mostly looking forward to getting the classes out of the way, and going back home. Going back home was great, after biking through the cold streets and all the snow, finally getting home was the best. It was heated, I had hot food waiting for me, and my whole family was there. Once I ate and chatted with my family, I went to my room. In my room I spent hours sitting on my desk. On my desk all I had was my laptop, where I used to spend endless hours watching videos, listening to music, but mostly playing games. Everyday I got in my room and sat down in my desk, it felt great, it was the moment I was waiting for, just having time to doing whatever I wanted. However, as the weeks went by, doing the same everyday started feeling bored. Even though I still wanted to be in my room, in my desk, at the end of the day I felt like I was just accomplishing nothing, nothing was new. One day, I decided that I was going to play less and try to find something different to do. I had some trouble with that though, since there was not really much for me to do there. Finally, one day, laying in bed, I realize I miss my dog, which we could not take to Germany. So I start looking at pictures I took of him before I left. There were a lot. Then, I had the idea to make an Instagram page to post all of his pictures. I set up the page and the account, and I started posting. A few people, like 30 or 40, started following the page, mostly friends and family. It was nice, but I wanted more. So I start looking at other successful dog instagram pages, and what made so many people follow them. Soon after, I had around 700 followers in my dog’s account.

Another weeks had went by, and I was back to mostly just playing games all day. The instagram page was doing good, but after a while it just boring again. In my boredom, I try to do something different again. I remember back in Panama how in one of my clases I learned to use Adobe Illustrator, an computer program that artists and graphic designers used to create images. There, I get the idea to draw my dog. I spent a few hours drawing and it was done. I then posted it on the instagram page and it got many likes. People actually like my drawing. Then, I draw a few more pictures of dogs just for fun. Later, checking the comments on the instagram post of the drawing I made, I saw that a few people, who had dogs, wanted their dogs drawn. There is where I thought about making a website, where you could send pictures of your dogs, and have them drawn. I also thought it would be nice if there was the option to print the picture in a phone case or in a coffee mug or a poster. It sounded really good, until I realized I had no idea where or how I was going to start. I had no website building experience, and my excitement for my idea started to fall apart. Still, even though I thought it was going to be impossible to learn without spending years of learning complex codes and systems, I typed on the google search bar “How to make a website, and sell stuff on it”. The journey had begun, day and night I was watching videos and reading articles about website building. After watching many tutorials, I found that first I needed to find a domain name for my website, I had to find it, and also buy it, so nobody could use it except me. I ended up buying the domain name “drawmydog.net”. Then, I had to find hosting for my domain. Hosting was a way to store the “to-be website”on the internet. I had to pay for that as well. After I got that out of the way, the real struggle began, actually building and designing my website. I took me hours everyday, sitting down on my desk, to complete a step in the design, or figure out how to make something work. I had to constantly look up for tutorials on the internet on how to add, remove or change anything on the design. It was a struggle, but after around two months, the website “drawmydog.net” was up and running.