In a city in which anything can happen, and frequently does, this afternoon still stood out! This was followed by a curfew-busting visit to Salon Canning.
It was the second time this trip that I got to hear my favourite orchestra play, but the first time I could actually dance to it …
Continue reading Ending an amazing day dancing to Romantica Milonguera playing live in Salon CanningI wanted to spend a little time hanging out with Pugliese, Troilo, Gardel, Caro, Di Sarli and D’Arienzo. Admittedly they’re all getting on a bit, and none of them are very talkative these days, but it would seem rude to be in Buenos Aires without visiting them.
Cementerio de la Chacarita is huge! Recoleta Cemetery, which had seemed pretty large when we visited it, would fit inside this one eighteen times. Terry had sent me a couple of links with approximate locations for each tomb, and finding most of them was straightforward (guide to follow), though D’Arienzo was a little harder to track down …
Continue reading Spending the weekend hanging out with a few of my tango matesFriday and Saturday nights are my curfew-free days, when I don’t have to work the next day. Friday had proven a washout, as my afternoon nap lasted until 11pm, and failed entirely to make a 1am visit to La Discépolo – but tonight I danced until 3am.
This was a return visit to a milonga I really enjoyed – and again with a live orchestra, this time La Juan D’Arienzo, who I’d really loved at La Viruta …
Continue reading Sans Souci with La Juan D’Arienzo (eventually!)I’d intended to start the dance day with another visit to El Abrazo, but in the end tiredness won out, so I spent the afternoon relaxing and napping.
That left De Querusa …
Continue reading De Querusa, and a friend I apparently hadn’t metPrivate and video interview complete, it was playtime! I’d had a great time at Sueño Porteño last time, and was looking forward to a return visit.
There was a small administrative matter to take care of, and this didn’t prove easy …
Continue reading Sueño Porteño delighting me, before a brief visit to La del Centro in MarabuI’m a little behind on the blogs now, in part because of working, and in part because I accidentally created another little project for myself while I was here! I really haven’t gotten the hang of holidays.
I said before that Diego and Laura have proven the perfect teaching duo, even though they have been working with me independently, and that continued today …
Continue reading Double-time in pivots in a great private with Laura, and an impromptu video interviewI remember returning from Buenos Aires in 2019 with a whole new understanding of what tango is about – at least, to me. Back here now, I realised that I’d lost some of that understanding along the way.
Well, perhaps not lost, nor really forgotten, but allowed it to become somewhat buried by other things – by the other world which is London tango. Here, now, I’ve reconnected with it …
Continue reading This person, this music, this moment: Reconnecting with the essence of tangoI’m now halfway through the three-week period in which I have to work as well as play, and I’ve more-or-less settled into a pattern:
In my quest for afternoon milongas which run some way into the evening, I seem to be sampling every milonga El Beso has to offer! Today it was Tango Camargo, which was very much like El Abrazo: older crowd, relaxed, friendly, simple dance.
Antonio wanted to ease himself in gently with a group class and practica, but as this was also at El Beso, I persuaded him to come with me to at least watch and soak up the atmosphere …
Continue reading A dreamy Tango CamaroToday we were sad to bid farewell to Tina. Not being overly keen on doing this at 7am, I did so at 4am before going to bed.
But I was very happy to welcome Maria and Antonio, who I hadn’t seen for a very long time! They arrived at around 9.45am, but were kind enough to go drink coffee around the corner until we’d crawled out of bed …
Continue reading The departure of La Tiñaorita, and arrival of Los ItalianosThere are certain things which only make sense in Buenos Aires. To anyone who has visited, this will make perfect sense: you’re tired from lack of sleep due to last night’s milonga, so you go for a nap in the evening and wake up around midnight ready for your next one. Repeat daily. Or on Fridays and Saturdays only, in my case!
That was Diego, in this case, but I entirely understood the sentiment. After four hours of sleep, I thankfully returned to sleep a little later and emerged around noon. But still went back to bed at around 7.30pm ready for a nap before we left at 9pm …
Continue reading “Sorry, I’m really tired: I won’t be coming out until after midnight”Surprisingly, an entire week of 6.30am starts didn’t kill me. But the benefit of the early starts is that by 11am, my working day was over – and weekend mode engaged!
I did have a couple of things to take care of before the dancing began, and of course Argentina does her best to entertain us in even the most mundane of activities …
Continue reading The tango gods can be fickle: From El Beso heaven to Salon Canning limboIt’s two-and-a-half years since my last visit to Sueño Porteño, now relocated to a beautiful but cramped venue, and it still makes me feel like a tango god! This was milonga 10 this trip, in 13 days. Just saying, to the sceptics!
Terry had booked a table for him, Rita, Tina, myself and Beatriz Dujovne, author of In Strangers Arms: The Magic of the Tango …
Continue reading Sueño Porteño still making me feel like a tango god – and a triple mix-up!Diego and Laura (website to follow) have never met, but their teaching couldn’t be more complementary if they were a team. Each is, in theory, working with me on different aspects of my dance, but it all meshes together so well it’s as if they planned their privates with me together.
Today’s private was with Laura, and I find it hard to believe we covered so much in such a short time …
Continue reading My teachers here have never met, but they work in perfect harmonyEverything in BsAs takes longer than you think. Getting cash. Picking up trousers that should have been waiting for me on Friday. Recharging a SUBE card. You name it.
All of which explains why I didn’t make my planned visit to Nuevo Chiqué, making this a milongaless day … !
Continue reading A Chiquéless day, but La Brigada for dinnerGetting up at 6.30am was a severe shock to my system, despite being good and going to bed before midnight. I did survive working for a living, but was very tired afterwards. I’d never previously mastered the art of the afternoon nap, but this time I went straight to bed and was asleep in minutes.
While I slept, Tina was somewhat busy shoe-shopping …
Continue reading Learning to nap, and Cafetin del Almagro LightTina went shopping at a market, had lunch, and visited Cementerio de la Recoleta. I don’t plan to visit that one, but will at some point go to Cementerio de la Chacarita to say hello to Pugliese and Troilo.
While they were spending time with people of varying degrees of aliveness, I opted for a lazy day at home before just one milonga …
Continue reading La Glorieta de Belgrano, with accidental gelatoNot sleeping after Salon Canning finally caught up with me at 5pm yesterday! I went for a stroll, bought some pastries and then had to admit defeat at go to bed at 5pm.
I felt more human by the morning. After coffee, tea, breakfast, and more tea, I set up my Buenos Aires office, ready for the morning …
Continue reading Setting up my Buenos Aires office; prepare for shorter blogs!A friend suggested I might get more sleep if I weren’t writing my blog posts. In truth, I’m buzzing so much when I get home from milongas that there’s no chance I’d sleep anyway if I tried going straight to bed. Writing is for me a way of winding down, even if I do also do it for a living!
I have made it to bed on previous nights, albeit sometimes at 5am. Last night, however, I was so euphoric that I might as well have had a nose full of cocaine for all the hope there was of sleep …
Continue reading Last ones standing: Closing Salon Canning at 4am (Video)Every day is a school day in Argentina. Today I learned: trust Terry on milongas, but never on cafes! He’d seen our visit to Cafe Tortini, which was beautiful but had mediocre food at tourist prices, and told us we should instead have gone to Cafe de Los Angelitos. So we did, with him. It was beautiful, but had rubbish food at tourist prices.
Service was so slow it took 45 minutes to get our glasses of water. We wanted coffee, but didn’t dare order it – we’d have been there for another hour or more. When presenting the bill, the waiter pointedly told us that the total didn’t include service. I pointedly left the appropriate tip for the standard of service …
Continue reading Another grand cafe, then one of the best tango nights of my life!Yesterday we were unexpectedly transformed into tango performers, and today we equally unexpectedly qualified for the Nobel Prize for Sheer Bloody-minded Determination!
I promise today’s blog will be the very last time I will ever again mention SIMs and data …
Continue reading Qualifying for a Nobel Prize before a visit to BarajandoThere have been many notable achievements throughout history, from great scientific breakthroughs like the discovery of electricity, to social and political triumphs like voting rights for women.
I think it is, however, fair to say that all of these pale into insignificance against the greatest challenge humanity has ever faced: loading a sensible amount of data onto a local SIM in Argentina. There is a Nobel Prize for Sheer Bloody-minded Determination awaiting the first person to achieve it …
Continue reading Ok, there may have been two milongas today … and a kind of performanceI slept for about nine hours, though still felt that was about ten hours short of the required quota. However, we did nothing in the morning, so a bit of lazing was the perfect start to the day.
This was helped considerably by my foresight. I’d decided that a one-month stay was more like short-term living than long-term holidaying, so had brought with me some key home comforts – including my favourite tea, infusers, and pint mug …
Continue reading Accidentally achieving one of my goals by going to the wrong milongaYes, that photo does look exceedingly tilted, which is an entirely accurate impression of how I felt after dragging myself out of bed. (For the avoidance of doubt, those are not my toes: Tina took the photo.)
I fully intended to sleep in until around noon. I instead slept from 4.30am to 7.27am. The mystery of why this might be was solved when I realised I’d been so tired last night (well, this morning) that I’d put the shutters up instead of down. That’s about the state of my brain right now …
Continue reading Way too little sleep, way too much food – and doing some technique exercisesI’m again numbering the milongas to help me keep track of them, but don’t expect anything like my previous crazy pace! One reason for staying here a month is to take things easy – an absolute maximum of one milonga per day. Yes, really. Honestly. You’ll see.
Knowing my love of live orchestras, Terry had pointed me to Sans Souci. We’d first been treated to a live performance of Orquesta Típica Misteriosa Buenos Aires at La Viruta on our previous visit, and I loved them! Terry kindly made reservations for us, as well as him and Rita …
Continue reading Milonga 1: Sans Souci at La Nacional, with Orquesta Típica Misteriosa Buenos AiresI recently wrote on my (very occasional) general blog about my past experiences with trying to learn languages.
Continue reading Being astonished at the effectiveness of my pidgin SpanishI’m generally a fast learner, and have picked up a fair number of skills in my life, but language learning has been one area where I appear to have pretty much zero ability to learn […] A concerted multi-year attempt at German, with very limited results, persuaded me that languages really weren’t my thing …
My post-Feast tango famine had left me feeling a little rusty, so I’d booked a private with Laura for the second day of my stay, to work on my technique before I hit the first milonga.
I’ve been incredibly lucky with my teachers. For me, a great teacher needs the ability to combine three very different qualities …
Continue reading Day two, and time for a tune-up with Laura HerediaI’ve been here exactly once before, for all of a fortnight. But as absurd as it may sound, there really was a sense of returning to a second home. I suspect I’m not the only returning tanguero/a to experience this feeling.
Staying in an apartment rather than a hotel, and for a month rather than a fortnight, added to the sense of a being a very short-term resident rather than a holidaymaker. The tiny airport terminal, the traffic on the taxi ride into the city, our apartment on a familiar street just two blocks from the hotel at which I’d stayed last time – the sights and sounds of the city all had an easy familiarity to them …
Continue reading Arriving home in Buenos AiresYep, really. Once you’ve booked your flight and accommodation, there are 11 further steps before you are ready to leave – most of which need to be done in the final 48 hours before you fly.
This guide is for UK passport holders travelling from the UK, and assumes you’ve had all three shots (you can’t visit Argentina if that’s not the case) …
Continue reading How to travel to Buenos Aires during COVID, in 11 easy steps
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