My apologies and explanations

Dear all:

I got back to Ishaka, Uganda, almost two weeks ago and I am already getting used to my new life and work at the Kampala International University -KIU. As I expected, I don’t see the way to keep blogging about my travels, my life in Africa and the anecdotes and adventures that come along with them in both Spanish and English. I have taken the decision to stick with my mother tongue in this. My apologies if it makes you feel that I abandon you. El caracol viajero will be from now on the only place where those things appear. I intend to blog about my experiences as scientist and that I will do it in English, not sure if here or somewhere else. I also want to get my other blogs reactivated and I hope you understand that I can’t keep writing things in duplicate.

I have adopted English as my language for work to the point that I am pretty useless when it comes to talk about science in Spanish. I understand that having a common language makes things much easier, much faster, and, now that I am kind of fluent, I see how English is a better choice than a Romanic language for that purpose. For story telling, though, it is no rival, especially for a Romanic-shaped brain like mine, late-learner and late-adopter of the Anglo ways. I do think in English in many moments throughout the day and there are concepts that I have learned in that language. There are, therefore, things that come to my mind in English and I intend to introduce a bit of that in El caracol. It’s just a bit of who I am, right? Someone who uses two languages to build one life.

Someone told me when I started this that I could write in English and people could use google translator. Well, google translator works as “well” the other way around and I am prioritizing my family here You’ll have to deal with the imperfections of the software, I’m afraid. Anyway, I hope you can take it as an excuse to learn a bit of Spanish and enjoy the shapes of the words, the pace of the paragraphs, the never-ending sentences… Who knows, you might even like it the same way I now like English when it was, together with Maths, the subject I hated the most in school. One never knows…

The apartment on the upper-right is my house now. Don’t you just love the combination of blue, green and white of the landscape?