I realized I never told the story about this, so even though it happened a long time ago, it's definitely worth telling:
A lot of people you meet have that one thing they're totally obsessed with. For my friend Sydney, it's ballroom dance. She loves it to the point where when she couldn't remember the direction she was supposed to turn her head in the Viennese Waltz, she just had to email her ballroom dance instructor back in the States and find out! So way back in February (about our third weekend in Paris), she convinced Dan and I to go out for a night of what she said would be salsa dancing at this great ballroom she'd found online. Our lack of ballroom expertise required, of course, practice lessons before heading out to dance, so the whole week before, we held salsa lessons in her room to learn all the basic moves. Being a relatively fast learner, I felt pretty confident as we headed out for our evening at Le Chalet du Lac de Saint-Mandé.
A lot of people you meet have that one thing they're totally obsessed with. For my friend Sydney, it's ballroom dance. She loves it to the point where when she couldn't remember the direction she was supposed to turn her head in the Viennese Waltz, she just had to email her ballroom dance instructor back in the States and find out! So way back in February (about our third weekend in Paris), she convinced Dan and I to go out for a night of what she said would be salsa dancing at this great ballroom she'd found online. Our lack of ballroom expertise required, of course, practice lessons before heading out to dance, so the whole week before, we held salsa lessons in her room to learn all the basic moves. Being a relatively fast learner, I felt pretty confident as we headed out for our evening at Le Chalet du Lac de Saint-Mandé.
The place was impossible to find. We only managed to find it after a 45-minute trek up and down the same road looking for the right street to turn on. We finally found it at the end of a long, sweeping driveway, looking like a castle from afar! But even after barely finding the place, and walking through sketchy woods to get there, that turned out to be the least of my worries. As it turned out, it wasn't going to be so much the night of salsa dancing for which we'd so avidly prepared, but instead mostly swing and tango...with maybe two salsa songs thrown in.
The best word to describe the place is pretentious. But there we were, me feeling only slightly out of place as I entered the room full of fancily-dressed middle-aged and older Parisian couples! But it wasn't long before I was asked to dance by men persistent enough not to take no for an answer, even after I insisted that I just didn't know how to dance. But there I was, being led by the hand onto the dance floor, and before I knew it, I was being spun around so fast I lost track of where I was...it felt like I was flying! Well, that was my intimidating introduction to the swing dance. A really sweet, elegant-looking older man kept asking me to dance throughout the evening, but he quickly realized I didn't have a clue what I was doing out on the dance floor, and patiently led me through all the steps of the swing and the tango. Learning the tango was by far my favorite moment of the evening. He explained all of the steps (in French), not by telling me when to move each foot, etc., but by explaining the attitude I should have...and just said to let my feet follow!
So that wonderful evening inspired my sudden interest in taking ballroom dance lessons, and is the reason why this happened in Barcelona:
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| Learning the Viennese Waltz along the Barcelona harbor, by the Mediterranean... can you imagine anything more beautiful? |
Barcelona, the most amazing city I've ever been to....I miss it.
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