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Life Away blog is all about leaving the familiar behind and starting over somewhere new. It’s about chasing once-in-a-lifetime experiences, while missing out on the everyday. It’s realizing you’ve seen more of an entire other country than your own hometown. It’s feeling at home everywhere and nowhere at once. Life Away sums up our lives as expats.

We’re Katlyn and Tapani, an American-Finnish couple who started out as expats in the UK in 2018 and started over in Finland in 2024. The idea for this blog came about while planning our move to Finland. There was so little info online that related to our situation and we knew we weren’t the only ones.

The Life Away blog is a collection of our lived experience as expats. We’ll share what everyday life is like, the basics, the unwritten rules, and the stuff no one tells you about. There’s a world of information out there that simply isn’t shared, and we want to fill in that gap.

We’re not travel influencers, passport collectors or digital nomads. We’re just an ordinary couple who fell into expat life headfirst without a second thought. Find out what a life away could mean for you.

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