Barrio de Tango

Yesterday I went to the school where my friend G teaches English, in the province of Buenos Aires (the ‘suburban’ district which surrounds the city). The school was having their end-of-year concert, and G had been asked to dance a tango. As the saying goes, it takes two, and she needed a partner, so she asked me! Little does she know how much I hate doing tango demos, and how many times I’ve sworn never to do one again! But she’s also been a very good friend to me here, helping me with all kinds of language and culture-shock things over the last year, so it was impossible to refuse.

So I found myself sitting in a taxi in the 40 degree heat (air-conditioning sporadic), chatting in Spanish amiably (with a sprinkling of comprehension) with the driver, trying not feel sick with nervousness and heading towards certain doom. A New Zealander dancing tango with a Jewess for Argentinian catholic school children and their parents in the baking sun in a playground deep in the province of Buenos Aires – I felt kind of far from home and wondering how I got there.

Fortunately no legs were broken during our brief interlude (actually, it turned out not to be an interlude so much as the grand finale – rather embarrassing), and I managed to get from one end of the tango to other without collapsing with fright.

The driver on the way back, after hearing G and I speak English, said in very broken English “I from Australian”, which he repeated a couple of times because we didn’t believe him. In Spanish he explained that his father was the captain of a cruise ship, and he had been born in Canberra, so held Australian citizenship even though he’d only been there for about a week. The taxi had a flat tyre, so the driver took a quick right turn and we rolled into a tyre repair workshop (literally wherever you turn here, it seems, there’s whatever you need – but that’s another story…). So G and I at least had a chance to relax and debrief over a coffee in the café next to the workshop.

When I finally got home, I had to go straight to L’s place for dinner, and again I felt a little surreal, sitting in my English friend’s apartment chatting in Spanish, eating curry and drinking (of all things British) Pimm’s and lemonade.

So it was a bit of a bizarre Friday…

No Produce Somnolencia

sung to the tune of Trasnochando:

Estornudando
como todo bomba
que no ve que le espera
que no sabe donde va
rechazaba
tus anti-alergicos, buen amigo
casi fuimos enemigos
por decirme tomar drogas

One Nighters

El Beso has without question the best dancers. I almost never have anything worse than an ok dance there, in stark contrast to, for example, Canning on a Monday night - last night at Canning I had nothing but the worst dances in my life.

But at El Beso, in the last couple of weeks, I've had two of the best dances of my life.

Interestingly (and possibly in keeping with my theory that enjoyment of a dance isn't necessarily mutual) in both cases, when I asked the lovely (twice my age) lady whether she came here often - ok, this may sound cheesy, but it's a pretty standard 3-minute-friend question - she evasively said "oh, I don't go to milongas regularly, just whenever and wherever I can".

Clearly these tango crone-goddesses don't like to be hunted down. That's ok, they were still lovely dances; as N would say, I can die a happy man.