S Novym Godom!

I know people sometimes find my blog by searching for the Russian equivalent to "Happy New Year", and this explains the "alien" title of the post. If you are willing to try, it is pronounced as "s nOvym gOdom", so in the next few days you can greet your friends and relatives in the foreign language.

The title also suits something I have been thinking about for a while, and now I am willing to give it a go. Since January 7th 2007 I have been keeping a Russian blog over at LiveJournal. By then I had lived in England for 3.5 years, spoke English mainly, so I needed to get back in touch with people in my native city and country, as well as not to forget my native language. I managed to do both, but there are certain things that LiveJournal as a platform does not let me do; and I have also been thinking of where to take my main blog further. Given that I write and speak fluently in both English and Russian, making this blog bilingual seemed like the most obvious and appropriate solution. I know a lot of you are using translation tools to read the blog, so I hope nobody feels excluded. In any case I will always make sure that both English and non-English speakers have the chance to understand me, as this is what we all need, surely.

The Russian posts will begin to appear on the blog after January 7th 2010: that's 3 years after LiveJournal blog was started.

I will also continue making sure that other languages feature regularly on Los Cuadernos de Julia.

Действительно, я долго думала и решила начать добавлять в этот блог посты на русском языке. Начну я это делать после 7-го января (моему Живому Журналу как раз исполнится три года), и причина самая простая: соображения прогресса. Я много сделала для этого блога в том виде, в каком его все знают, и он (блог) тоже мне многое дал. Но время идет, нужны новые вызовы, а что может быть лучше, сложнее и прекраснее, чем многоязычный блог?