Now to discuss dancing...
I organized this in the order of our dancing experiences.
1. Flamenco Show (Friday night)
After eating at La Brigada, we wanted to see a tango show. We were directed to a bar but on this evening, it had a flamenco dancer instead of tango. It was pretty entertaining because the dancer was really good. Three things stood out from the evening: a) the dancer looked like Jon Snow from Game of Thrones; b) Garv and I thought the dancer's hair was great and LG didn't; and c) a discussion (primarily between LG and me) about one of the people in the bar (no more details forthcoming).
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| Jon Snow--The resemblance is uncanny! |
2. Tango Show (Saturday night)
On Saturday night we were supposed to have Tango lessons, dinner, and see a Tango show. Unfortunately, the Tango lessons were canceled (we're not sure why). This was disappointing because we were all really looking forward to it. The Tango show, however, was incredible. I don't know anything about tango except that it is extremely sexy. The tango dancers in the show were clearly professional and were able to demonstrate a lot of skill and sexiness.
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| Before the show |
3. Tango Pictures (Sunday afternoon)
In tourist areas, there are "tango dancers" with whom tourists can have their pictures taken. Garv suggested that I do it, so I figured what the hell. So Ana had me get into four different poses and LG snapped our pictures. It was actually a lot of fun and provided us with a lot of laughs.
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| Setting up |
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| Our first "dance" |
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| This was actually pretty easy |
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| A less serious one |
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| A very serious one |
4. Street Tangos (Sunday afternoon)
In tourist areas, street performers and small bars also have tango shows for tourists. These do NOT exist throughout the city, but they were fun to see.
5. Ballet (Sunday evening)
On Sunday evening, we got tickets to watch ballet at the Teatro Colon, a world-wide famous performance venue. Since we have no knowledge or interest in ballet, we got the $5 seats because we wanted to see the building. Our $5 seats ended up being standing room only tickets in the 7th or 8th or 12th deck or whatever and we could barely see. The building itself is magnificent, but extremely inefficient. (I estimate that it only sat about 1500-2000 people (which is about what a high school gym can seat.) The first half of the ballet, before intermission, was pretty interesting because of the skill involved. After intermission, we moved down a level to some actual seats. It was almost impossible to see from the seats, I was tired, and there's only so much ballet I can appreciate despite being "well-cultured" so I napped for almost the entire second half of the performance. Napping was a great decision.
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| Exterior of Teatro Colon |
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| Don't lean over the rail too far |
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| Lots of decks |
6. Milonga (Sunday night)
The milonga was definitely the highlight of the dancing. A milonga is simply a place where the tango is danced (or in this case the two-step (or something similar) set to 1950s American music). This milonga was held in a place that resembled a VFW or American Legion hall and it was locals enjoying a Sunday night before a national holiday on Monday. The dance floor had three groups: beginner, intermediate, and advanced. Each group had a couple leading the dance steps. The men were on one side and the guy showed the "students" the steps while the woman did the same with the women. Then after five minutes or so, the leaders had the men and women select a partner and dance for a few minutes together before switching to new partners.
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| "Learning" the dance steps |
After ten minutes or so of observing (especially noting that women outnumbered men), I decided to give it a try. (I am a poor dancer. I inherited my dancing from my dad who is undoubtedly the worst dancer ever. For whatever reason, the footwork for dancing is not natural to me. It's strange that I have good footwork when it comes to sports, but such horrible footwork when it comes to dance.) So I get out there and the leader guy had us guys go through the steps for five minutes and I thought I had it down...Then it was time to find a partner and luckily for me, the first partner I selected was British! It went pretty well because she was able to tell me what to do. Then it was time to switch partners and the girl I picked was from a northern Argentinian province and her English was much worse than my Spanish. But she wasn't a good dancer either so we just kind of moved around and had fun. Then for my last partner, I selected a Porteno who should have been with the intermediate or advanced group. She didn't speak any English and was trying to get me to do the steps absolutely correctly and it was going disastrously. The leader dude saw my difficulties and tried to help, but it wasn't going well...So he left and she tried to teach me some more. But since she couldn't speak English and I couldn't speak the language of dance, it wasn't as much fun...Then it was time to switch partners so I slunk off the dance floor to have a beer...
Shortly after, the lessons ended and the floor was opened up for people to dance. So the good dancers come out and we watched them and it was very interesting. It's one of those things, like playing guitar, that I wish I could do but I'm so bad at that I choose to allocate my time in other ways...like writing blogs.
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