One of the challenges in tango is that it’s really hard to be happy where we are. We always want to be at the next level, whatever that may mean to each of us. Even for me, an avowed ‘journey not the destination’ guy, it’s tough.
Tango is also never a straight line. It’s the very definition of two steps forward, one step back – and sometimes feels like the other way around …
Continue reading Feeling like my tango has finally levelled-up – after a very long plateauWhen I returned from a month in BsAs last year, I said that I had learned four lessons. Reconnecting with the essence of tango (‘this person, this music, this moment’). Having milongas be a more rounded social experience, rather than dancing every tanda. Fewer plans, more spontaneity. Spending even more time listening to even more tango music.
Happily, I felt like each of those lessons stayed with me. When reflecting on what I’d learned this time, two big things of course stood out …
Update: My first return to a favourite London milonga turned out to give me a better perspective on this.
Continue reading How did Buenos Aires change me this year?My first visit, I almost immediately understood how people come here for a fortnight and end up staying for ten years. My second visit, I actually got as far as semi-serious discussions about moving here. This time, I’ve felt that pull more strongly than ever. I really didn’t want to leave.
There are a zillion reasons not to do it, ranging from practical issues around property to being so far away from London friends …
Continue reading Returning home before I was ready, and really feeling the temptation to emigrateOnce 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 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 3amThe closure of Salon Canning sounds so terribly wrong even as a written phrase, let alone a reality. Yet it’s true: the most famous milonga venue in the world has closed its doors to tango.
I first heard the news as a rumour, without any linked source, so Googled ‘Salon Canning closing.’ In a bittersweet moment, the first hit was to one of my own blog posts …
Continue reading A eulogy to Salon CanningI debated whether to write this post. Floorcraft is a perennial topic, and the view from friends who’ve been in London tango far longer than I have is that nothing is going to change, so there’s not a lot of point in yet another discussion about it.
But at the same time, it is without question one of the biggest differences between tango in Buenos Aires, and that of London – and during my recent month-long stay in Argentina, I came to see the topic in a whole new light …
Continue reading Not just another grumble about the F wordLast time when I returned home from BsAs, I found myself wishing that London tango were more like, well, Argentine tango. I mean, I looked forward to dancing with friends and favourite partners, of course. But I felt the contrast keenly in a number of ways.
This time too. The difference was deciding that, while there are factors I can’t control, there are others that I can – whether directly or indirectly …
Continue reading Bringing a little Buenos Aires back to London with meI said at the beginning of the trip that I’d be adopting a more relaxed approach this time around, after last time visiting 25 milongas in 12 days.
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.
This claim was met with a certain amount of scepticism (‘100%’ is a certain amount, right?) …
Continue reading Saying farewell to Buenos Aires with one last milonga – and one last protestIn 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 stepsIt’s been over two months since my last tango blog, partly because I’m no longer blogging everything, but mostly because there’s been very little tango to blog about. I caught COVID shortly after the Feast (though probably not there), and since then have made it to exactly five milongas and one private.
That’s because, after a week of flu-like illness, I had about six weeks of almost zero energy – literally going to bed at 6pm or 7pm most nights …
Continue reading After the Feast, a Covid-induced famine – but it’s about to end …
I wrote a lengthy piece about lessons from Buenos Aires, but I realised there’s another, slightly more amorphous, one.
It’s about role models …
Less a short film, more the video equivalent of a snapshot. All shot handheld on my iPhone. But while it won’t win any cinematography awards, it captures the memories rather well!
It feels like I arrived only yesterday; it feels like I’ve been here forever. It feels like milongas are the real world, and London is some kind of vague dream.
Forever is also about the time it will take me to integrate everything I’ve learned here, both in lessons and from dancing in all those milongas – but let’s at least make a start …
Continue reading Twenty-five milongas in twelve days: lessons from Buenos Aires
My third and final private was another with Laura, and it was an absolutely amazing one! Half of it was devoted to technique, the other half to more simple tools for use in crowded milongas and to give me more options for expressing the music.
We worked on the first step of the walk, aiming to get a vertical diagonal feel to it – pushing down into the floor with the standing foot while creating a rising sensation in the chest. Laura also had me try the Argentine style position with my left hand …
Continue reading An amazing private, a lovely dinner and two last milongas
My plan for the day was simple: work in the morning, a 90-minute private in the afternoon, a suit fitting, the first hour of a milonga in the evening and in bed by midnight.
Some of that happened …
Getting out of bed at 7am was again difficult. Well, impossible, I guess, as I didn’t. I had a rather abbreviated breakfast before work.
I’ve never been able to nap – once I’m asleep, I’m asleep, and being woken by an alarm after a short time just makes me feel like death. Not even death warmed up. But a bout of insomnia a long time ago did teach me that rest is the next best thing to sleep, so I decided to have a very lazy afternoon, just reading in bed, before heading out to an 8pm milonga …
As is usual this week, I had work in the morning. Getting up at 7am is never pleasant in my world, but it wasn’t as bad as yesterday thanks to me exercising restraint where milongas were concerned.
After work, it was time for my second Spanish pronunciation lesson, dealing with the rest of the consonants …
No, don’t worry, I don’t mean I caused another diplomatic incident, this time by mispronouncing something, I mean I actually took a lesson in Spanish pronunciation …
Continue reading A lesson in Spanish pronunciation, and Misteriosa Milonga
Most of my lessons are very technique-focused. The great thing about those is that a small detail can make a massive difference to the experience you give to a follower. The downside, however, is that because you’re always revisiting the basics, it can make you feel like you’re starting all over again.
Today, I went from feeling like starting again from first principles to feeling like a tango god …
Continue reading From tango lesson to feeling like a tango god in three easy steps
I first saw this venue in a performance video rather early on my tango journey, and have wanted to visit it ever since.
Here’s how Wander Argentina describes it …
Continue reading La Catedral and El Tacuari: not much dancing, but there was applause
I got as far as the hotel lobby then had to go back upstairs for my sunglasses; seems I’d forgotten what it was like to leave the hotel in daylight.
I’d originally planned to go to La Maria Rolera to see how it compared to its sister milonga on Tuesday, but Diego was insistent I had to go to the DNI practica, and I’m certainly not going to argue with his recommendations.
I did, though, manage to go to both …
Continue reading A relaxed afternoon at the DNI Practica and La Maria Rolera milonga
You’ll have to excuse the blobby photos from milongas. I’m really trying not to take photos this trip. Instead, I’m shooting very short video clips with my phone, and will then edit them into maybe a 5-10 minute overview of the whole trip. This means most of my photos are in fact screengrabs from video, thus not the greatest quality.
The daytime part of the blog is rather brief: I had breakfast in bed, then lazed (apart from accidentally writing a blog post).
I made up for this laziness in the evening, managing one-and-a-bit classes and three milongas …
Continue reading Patio de Tango, La Viruta and a magical evening at Salon Canning
My sartorial standards in milongas are respectable, but I’ve now given up on mornings. We just made it to the hotel breakfast room before it closed, and I was unshaven, with uncombed hair and wearing my Virgin sleep suit.
Breakfast was spent sorting out some more of our tango schedule. With up to 20 or so milongas from which to choose every day, it’s no easy task …
Continue reading Some reflections, some wanderings and an ‘entertaining’ milonga
Many friends have claimed I don’t understand the concept of holidays. There is some truth to this. With my background in business travel with extremely limited time off, I’m used to making the most of the time, so there isn’t much lazing around. I’ve always taken the view that you can do that with greater comfort, convenience and economy at home.
However, this morning was a relaxed one. I did nothing more than visit the two tango shoe shops directly opposite the hotel …
Well, ok, yes, but ‘best night of tango of my year-and-a-bit of dancing’ is a little longwinded and doesn’t quite have the same ring to it …
Continue reading The best night of tango of my life (so far)
Today was a fairly thorough introduction to Buenos Aires. In particular, how Argentine time works.
Our plan was to attend a class, an afternoon milonga, another class and an evening milonga. We only managed the latter two – mostly because we spent a great deal of time getting our hands on some cash …
Continue reading A busy first day – but just the one milonga …
Everyone says it’s only a matter of time. Take up tango, and at some point you’re going to want to go to Buenos Aires.
Diego kindly gave me a literal day-by-day milonga schedule, with a taste of everything from uber-traditional at one end through casual porteño to ‘underground,’ and I’m having a lesson and a drink with Iona Italia …
ben lovejoy 