A session with an accent...

That's how the chair of the session(and second speaker of it) described us when introducing my talk. It was just a remark as both speakers in that short session are Spanish and both have a remarkable thick accent. That was not a problem for the talks and no one complained about my accent nor my presentation(which is weird, as I'm sure it was kind of al-right but not perfect). Anyway, it was a good experience. I found it a bit difficult to write the talk, it was not for an expert audience but for people with a variety of backgrounds ranging, in principle, from atomic experimental physicists to hardcore condensed matter theorist. So I had to introduce two traditionally different fields pretty much from zero and build up to my work and my results, all in 25 minutes. I think I managed, leaving a trillion details out and only offering a hand wavy picture of everything but that's the most you can hope to do in such circumstances. I was asked a couple of interesting questions but I don't think I offered a good answer to any of them, sadly. That's something I need to get better at.

But anyway, this is not to say that my accent has not troubled me in the past. I can recall at least a couple of times where my accent/mispronunciation of some or many words has made the person I was talking to hear something completely different to what I originally said. Once I was about to enter the toilet and I told my housemate something like "if you need me, I'll be in there doing some vowel stretching" and for some reason he heard "if you need me, I'll be in there doing some balls stretching", hence the concerned look he gave me before I closed the door. A different time, I was discussing bouldering with another climber from the uni club and I was telling her how I am a bad climber but I have some considerable strength hence "I like big jugs". She heard "I like big Jack" and also glanced in a surprised manner at me(There's a guy called Jack in the club too, and he's certainly a big gentleman). These things happen less often nowadays, but from time to time, someone will get the wrong idea about me... :)