Hola!
There has been some
changes in our life here in Buenos Aires in the last couple of weeks.
One of them is that we have moved to a different barrio
(neighbourhood), Palermo, which is known to be more trendy, expensive
and a lot of fancy restaurants and clubs. Our new hostel (see photo
album) is located in the very edge of Palermo, so the trendiness is
not that apparent in the direct area where we live, and to be honest
I am quite happy about that. It is slightly more relaxed still. But a
10 minute walk takes us to the fancy cafés and shops as well as to
many of the tango venues where the milongas are held. We are excited
to get a different view of the city this way.
Our new hostel is owned by
a family with 4 quite young brothers and the weekends are definitely
party time (2 of the brothers live here and their friends come over a
lot). The other weekend they invited us to a typical Argentinian
barbecue, and ASADO. It is an our door experience where the meat is
prepared on a specially build grill. They put A LOT of meat and
chicken on the grill (yes, I ate chicken, I admit....it is hard to
remain a strict vegetarian in these circumstances. They have not
heard about soy sausages here really...), and around half past
midnight (local dinner time) 15 of us ate a big meal on the terrace.
That was a proper Argentine dinner!
A few days after we had
moved to our new place we received fine quest from Sweden: Ingrid and
Nikals (see photos). It was so amazing to have the two worlds meet
and to be able to share this exotic big city experience with people
that know me from home.
We had
arranged for Ingo and Niklas to stay in our hostel, which is great.
They are staying in Argentina for 3 weeks and then they will be
travelling in Peru and Brazil and will not be going back to Sweden
until Christmas time. (Here is the address to their travel blog in
Swedish: http://www.resedagbok.se/ingridnicklas).
Their first week of their
3 month long journey are spending with me and Roy here in BA and then
we will be travelling to see more of rural Argentina for about 7-10
days. I am looking forward to that trip a lot.
Another one of the changes
in our life is on the subject of tango. We have changed the path from
the tango noevo style to the more traditional tango style called
tango salon, or tango muilongero. This means that we have left our
beloved tango school, and it feels a bit strange since DNI more of
less became our second home for more than 6 weeks. But our new
temporary teachers, Enzo and Edit (that I found on a milonga and
asked if they did private classes) are guiding us well towards the
more traditional tango and in that process mainly Roy, but me too to
some extent, have reconnected with the love for tango and remembered
the reason why we love the dance in the first place. We have
currently come to the conclusion that the tango noevo style is more
like salsa, focused on figures and fancy moves, whereas the
milonguero style is more about the connection between the dancers,
which is what we are more interested in. More like a hug in motion
and the qualities of connection and movement are much more what we
want to explore. The fact that most of the people around the world
dance traditional tango also supports our choice of wanting to focus
on this aspect of the dance. Someone once said that you should learn
the basics of tango in the traditional style and then add the more
modern tango noevo style, and I am starting to think that maybe they
where right.
So, this week we have had
2 hours of private lessons daily with Edit and Enzo and in 12 hours
we have made great progress in changing the style of our dancing as
well as connecting with each other in the dance. These lessons are
about working on me and Roy as a dancing couple and this has felt
completely different than any of the work we have done at DNI (our
old tango school) . It is starting to feel like we are learning
dancing REAL tango now and we are so exited about being able to dance
with each other, something that has actually been a struggle for us
up-until now.
The other day we both
bought new tango shoes. Just to celebrate. Take a look at the photos,
the shoes are gougers!
Yesterday we
and our Swedish guests went to a tango class completely new to all of
us: Tango Zen. It was a walking meditation class where we where
walking both individually and in couples to nice chilled music and in
the end to tango music. The walking exercises where quite simple and
the experience was very calming and beautiful. All of us enjoyed it.
The teacher also does classes where he focuses more on the tango
technique then on meditation and maybe we will try that when we have
returned from out trip. Here is the web address if you want to check
it out: http://www.tangozen.com/workshops_new_en.htm.
Next time I will be
reporting from Barilcohe, the Argentine lake district south from
Buenos Aires.
Love
ania x x x
