Once again, I feel like I’ve been here forever, and I feel like I arrived ten minutes ago.
After a final early morning’s work, it was off to El Abrazo for the last milonga of the trip. This was once again at El Beso, my fourth visit this week. It was a wonderful way to end my stay …
Continue reading My farewell milonga, El Abrazo – and a surprise lift to the airport!Following another heavenly Tango Champagne Club on Tuesday, and a delightful Perfume de Mujer on Wednesday, it was back to El Beso for the third-but-not-final-time this week for Tango Camargo.
Today I got a wonderful surprise in the form of an unexpected live orchestra …
Continue reading The El Beso afternoon milonga fun continues, at Tango CamargoHaving a strict curfew to ensure I can be awake at 6.30am, my milonga options are now very limited. Almost all of the evening ones are non-starters, as they begin at about the time I need to be heading to bed.
The music at last week’s Perfume de Mujer was pretty much exclusively rhythmical, but my afternoon milonga options were that or– Well, that …
Continue reading If you can’t beat the rhythmical music, join it: Perfume de Mujer at El BesoThe shock to my system of having to get up at 6.30am yesterday for a week of working in the mornings saw my afternoon nap end at 7pm – so no dancing yesterday. However, that gave me a decent amount of total sleep, enabling me to skip a nap today and head back to the Champagne Tango Club this afternoon.
As an aside, there’s overlap here with some thoughts I had about time. Some might consider doing nothing more than working and sleeping yesterday to be a poor use of a day in Buenos Aires, but when the result is a day in which I feel refreshed and truly able to appreciate dancing, then I consider it time well spent …
Continue reading I’m really going to miss the Champagne Tango ClubSunday’s primary task was to change time zones – which is to say, prepare for a week of 6.30am starts as I returned to work for my final week here.
I resisted my favoured Sunday evening milonga, and instead had a relaxing day: a leisurely lunch with a friend, followed by a visit to the nearby cultural centre …
Continue reading A day without dance! But a great deal of tango talk …This city can make me feel like a tango god. When I get the right milonga, the right atmosphere, the right music, the right follower, the right floorcraft … when everything flows effortlessly, my partner and I reading each other perfectly, and I feel like I own the floor.
It can also make me feel like a tango toddler. When I’m at a milonga where the music is relentlessly fast, where everyone is spinning in high-speed circles, and I wonder what the hell I would do even if someone was looking in my direction …
Continue reading Feeling like a tango god or tango toddler; rarely anything between the twoA tango lesson we all learn rather early is that there are never any guarantees. You can go to the same milonga in the same place with the same DJ – even dance with some of the same people – and have wildly different experiences on different occasions.
While our head may know this, however, it can still prove difficult to convince our heart that we haven’t found the secret formula …
Continue reading A dangerous visit to Perfume de Mujer at El Beso; go to dinner with Ale, but never travel with her!Updated 6th April 2023
This was originally part of another blog post, but as there have been a number of developments, and it’s turning into something of a major source of contention between milonga organisers, I’ve now separated it into its own post.
I’ll begin with the background; then the various developments; offer my own thoughts (and sums); and share an opposing view from a friend …
Continue reading Two-tier pricing controversy: One milonga entry fee for residents, a higher one for foreign visitorsGiven that Alessandra and I generally enjoy different milongas here, it may say something that we were both in agreement on the most recent additions to the list: Muy Lunes at La Comedia, and the Champagne Tango Club at El Beso.
The former was a nice atmosphere, and we both had a good sociable evening, but virtually none of the music appealed. The latter was a complete contrast music-wise, and was for me that rarest of tango species: an absolutely perfect milonga …
Continue reading A tale of two milongas: Muy Lunes, with one success; and a perfect Champagne Tango ClubBeing Argentina, there are some complications around time. The country is located at a longitude that would properly put it either four or five hours behind GMT. But the place decided to temporally relocate itself some considerable distance to the east, and have a time zone just three hours behind.
Additionally, Argentina may or may not observe daylight saving time, depending how it feels. The national government decides this on a year-by-year basis, perhaps by rolling dice or flipping coins – but, either way, individual provinces are free to either go along with that year’s result, or adopt their own daylight savings policy …
Continue reading Sans Souci lacking the king of sound engineering; a few tandas at La Comedia; and bed at 6amIt had to happen at some point. Tango wouldn’t be tango without the downs as well as the ups, and my stay had been so amazing to date, it was inevitable the tango gods would eventually notice they hadn’t had their fun with me for a while.
It had seemed like a promising night: the reliability of midnight to 2am-ish at Parakultural, followed by the fun of trying out a new milonga at Pipí Cucú from 2am-ish to 4am …
Continue reading The fickleness of tango finally shows up: An empty Parakultural, and a dancing desert at Pipí CucúDiego has been encouraging me to cabeceo more and more advanced followers, and I have been doing this – very happily here, and with a little more trepidation in London. I did, however, draw the line at teachers and performers.
Until last night, when I danced with at least two, and I suspect more. Entirely by mistake, mind, but hey …
Continue reading A sleep-deprived mistake turning into a wonderful surprise, at Milonga en lo de BalmacedaI have a dozen identical white linen shirts, which you might think sounds like a lot. But given that I generally need a change of shirt during a milonga, and am sometimes doing two milongas a day, dropping and collecting laundry is a regular task.
The hours of my local laundry are clearly shown as 11am to 9pm. Of course, this being Argentina, that doesn’t mean 11am to 9pm. It means ‘We do, broadly speaking, have the general ambition of operating hours which may perhaps bear some resemblance to these. Oh, and we may randomly close for half an hour to an hour at any point.’ Which explains this sign when I got there at 5pm …
Continue reading An Argentine embrace, and a wonderful night at Muy Martes and ParakulturalLife has been pretty stressful of late, so one of my goals for this trip was a take a more relaxed approach to my stay. Instead of spending all my time zipping from milonga to milonga, to dial things down, and focus on quality over quantity. Also, to curb my FOMO and feel relaxed about re-visiting milongas I know I love, as well as exploring a few new ones. Oh, and get some sleep!
I’ve been … somewhat successful at this, mostly sticking to one milonga per day, and taking some downtime just to rest and relax at home. However, I discovered that making friends with D’Arienzo has had one downside …
Continue reading Discovering the downside of my new-found friendship with D’Arienzo, at Los Domingos and La LucyThe last time I visited Confitería Ideal was back in 2019, when it was a building site. The good news was that the bags of cement had been replaced by tables and chairs. The bad news is that the new owner has no interest in sullying his shiny new building with milongueros.
They allowed us in, but strictly on condition that we consumed calories rather than burned them …
Continue reading A visit to post-building site Confitería Ideal, then Sans Souci at La NacionalI was awake and out of bed at the crack of noon, as I had a packed afternoon schedule ahead of me: drinking a hot chocolate at Cafe Tortoni, one of the city’s Grand Cafes.
While most of the city virtually defines ‘faded grandeur,’ there’s nothing faded about the grand cafes. They’ve been beautifully maintained or restored, and the impressive settings leads to queues of people at the door …
Continue reading Cafe Tortoni; Pablo & Noelia class; and a sociable night at BilongónThe day opened with a great deal of drumming outside our apartment block, which I initially assumed was part of a five-day national celebration of my arrival. It involved lots of men in blue shirts, and lots of buses parked haphazardly all over the place.
I went to confirm my theory, and with the help of Google Translate learned that it was bus drivers who, as well as welcoming me, were striking over pay. And using their buses to block one of the main avenidas in the city – namely, the one we live on …
Continue reading Bus games; five minutes in La Catedral; and a wonderful La Cachila at Club GricelThe two-tier pricing controversy escalated, so now has a standalone post here.
It’s Alessandra’s first visit to BsAs, and in the first couple of days she wanted to spend every waking moment in the daytime out sightseeing, and then every waking moment at night in milongas. By day five, she finally understood that you can only do that for so long! She visited museums and galleries in the day, and had no energy to dance in the evening; I had a quiet day at home, and was out dancing until 3.30am.
All the same, the night was a first: I left before the end of the milonga! Only 30 minutes before, mind, but still …
Continue reading A rhythmical revelation at Porteño y BailarínAlessandra hasn’t quite grasped that mornings and I have an uneasy relationship at the best of times, and when operating on BsAs milonga time, I view them in much the same light as Guardia Vieja tandas.
Instead, she decided that pre-9am was a good time to suggest going out for coffee, and about an hour later was the perfect time for a Spanish lesson …
Continue reading A very Argentine afternoon, and closing Parakultural at 4amIt was a year ago to the day that I was last here in BsAs for a month-long stay. As a freelance writer, I don’t earn any money when I’m not working, so my last visit was one week of pure holiday, and three weeks working holiday. This was … not a good plan!
Don’t misunderstand me: I had a truly wonderful time. What I did not have was much sleep! So this time I decided to take the financial hit of three weeks’ holiday and just the last week of working in the mornings …
Continue reading A wonderful welcome back to my second home: closing El Beso at 3am
ben lovejoy 