Sunday, July 24th, 5:08 p.m.
Beth and I bought the most beautiful tango shoes yesterday. They are hand-crafted, full leather, open-toed, red with a delicate yet suggestive black design, suede-bottomed, incredibly light, comfortable, sexy 8-cm heels (2.5 inches). I love them.
Tango is difficult. I took an intermediate lesson once in Lyon, France, while I was there, and another "lesson" last night. The lesson last night was more of an exercise in crowd control, actually. There had to have been 200 people there, and they split us up into beginner, intermediate, and advanced by splitting the room up into three with barriers made of folding chairs. Actually I spent most of the lesson avoiding people who might ask me to dance. I guess I'm a dance snob, but I don't see how two beginner stumbling together is really going to make much of a difference.
I learned much more from just dancing with people during the dance after the lesson:
• You must keep your entire torso facing towards your partner. Twisting and turning your lower body means isolating it; your shoulders should never be involved
• There is supposed to be a one-minute pause between songs. In other words, if you're dancing with someone, you'll probably dance around 3 songs with them, and in between it is expected that you chat for a minute, getting to know them. It is considered a little bit rude to just begin dancing
• One of the sexiest moves (to me) in tango is when the woman crosses her legs. This is very easy when someone is showing you the basic, but it gets very complicated very quickly to know when to do it when you're actually dancing with someone. One of my partners semi-cleared this up for me by saying that you can usually tell by whether you take two steps back. This helped a lot.
Also, it appears that young people do, in fact, dance, (I had heard that only old ppl dance tango here), and that there is no requirement for dressing up. Many of the women were wearing jeans, rolled up so you could see their heels, and/or jeans with a dress or skirt over them.
Other observations:
Time in Bs.As. (which is, btw, how they abbreviate it) is a whole pheneomenon in and of itself. Here's a clip to go along with the idea:
"One recent addition to the Palermo Viejo (where we live! we're going to go here) dining scene is 5 Olsen, where the executive chef, Germán Martitegui, creates his signature Scandinavian-Argentine fusion cuisine in a blond-wood palace of modern design. Start with a caviar appetizer paired with samplings of various vodkas and aquavits.
For dessert, try the molten chocolate cake filled with a hot dulce de
leche core, and swimming in a white chocolate yogurt sauce. And if you ever doubted that Argentines eat dinner late, note that Sunday brunch at Olsen is served until 8:30 p.m."
That's right: Sunday brunch served until 8:30pm. And happy hour is from 7-9pm. I kid you not - it really is. Which means theoretically, you could have brunch at 6pm and then just go straight to happy hour.
Language spot:
Unas diferencias entre el castellano de argentina y españa:
en argentina se dice "acá" en vez de "aqui"
se dice "extrañar" en vez de "echar de menos"
se dice "dijiste" en vez de "has dicho"
se dice "departamento" en vez de "piso"
se dice "como se conocen ustds" en vez de "como os conoceis"
