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…