Let's switch to English!

First of all, this is not a real post but an announcement (or warning!). Thing is, it just occurred to me that it would be better if I just wrote in English. Why? Well, I have several reasons, but above all is my willingness of making sure that nobody gets left out. After all, the main reason for maintaining and updating a blog like this is to let people know about what's going on with you and with your life, and I fortunately happen to have non-Spaniard friends/colleagues who have tried "sneaking" a little bit around here but of course have been faced with the Spanish language barrier, and I don't like that: it is sad, unfortunate, unfair and... it is avoidable!

Second, our reduced -but well-established!- blog "fan club" (you guys know who you are!) will certainly not have a problem whatsoever with the English stuff (or will you?!) What's more: someone out there in the "audience" might even consider this an enjoyable challenge, plus learning out of reading the stories in here might be a somewhat useful experience (right mom?). And finally, I should confess I myself want to use this blog as an excuse to keep on brushing up (I wish I could say "improving", but I am not sure I improve anymore...) my English writing skills as well. Never must one stop "exercising" a language!

So what about the flags? Well, essentially the crappy English you can expect to come across here will be of course the worst of the mixtures of Canadian, American, British (and Irish!) English, which obviously is the inevitable and predictable result of having spent important parts of my life in these countries and of having been exposed to these "variations" of the universal language that English is nowadays. I will go further and say that, after having listened (mainly on math meetings though) to such a wide range of English accents and "styles": Japanese, Chinese, Corean, Italian, French, Brazilian, Iranian, Serbian, Indian, Australian, New Zealander, Mexican, Uruguayan, Argentinian, German, Norwegian, Russian... (I wonder if this list really ends...), now I don't know which accent is which or if I can even speak/write in proper English anymore! :)

Special mention deserves the Irish flag (Sheila, this goes for you!) This is the story: when I was a graduate student I was given the (time-consuming and unrewarded) task of setting up my Málaga departamental webpage. All right. Since I am a stubborn guy, I wanted to have both the Spanish and English versions of it (the kind of unfinished project that this became can still be reached at http://agt.cie.uma.es). Needless to say, my naive idea was to put tiny little Spanish and British flags in order for anyone to be able to switch from one language to the other. Makes sense, right? I was visiting Belfast (Northern Ireland) at the time and I thought I could ask the extremely helpful secretary to the Pure Mathematics Department (where I was staying at) if she could be so kind to have a look at the English version of the webpage in order to detect errors, correct mistakes, improve expressions and the so. Thus, she went through all the pain of performing a thorough checking and in the end, and to my surprise, she said that everything was OK and really nice except for one thing, which was a huge mistake: I had the wrong flag for the go-to-the-English-version part, as it should be the Irish flag instead!!... And after the 10-second initial shock and knockout, I realized in some sense she was right: English does not only "belong" to England, but to many many countries around the globe.

Hence, and to put an end to this boring story (sorry folks!), what I decided here is this: OK, I cannot put all the English-speaking countries' flags, can I?... But I can at least gather the ones of the countries that I have lived in for a while. Thus, hopefully, and if I keep on running this blog and keep on traveling around (the second is more likely and exciting than the first, I should say...), then someday soon I will be adding the New Zealand flag, and then the Australian flag... and I won't stop until there are no more flags left. :)

I am not really sure I was very convincing here (wow, this resembles a declaration of independence, or the swearing of an oath or something!), but should you have any complaints about this "blog policy change", please do not hesitate to go to the "comments" section below to let me know what you think about it (whether you are glad, pissed off, or simply don't give a damn!) ;p

By the way, don't panic: the next "real post" is coming soon (about my travel to beautiful Colorado Springs, Colorado!). I am just waiting to have all the pictures of the event ready (most were taken with other people's cameras, ups!) So stay put for the next chapter!!

Finally, and as usual:

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