All That and A Bag of Tortilla Chips

I recently had the opportunity to go salsa dancing, twice. Of course, by recently I mean during the last 2 months. It reminds me of the last time I went swing dancing (read about it here on June 14th). That was one of my favorite posts.

The first time was with Renee from my bible study. There was a 1-hour lesson before the dance started. I got there about halfway through the lesson. So I missed how the basic step was supposed to go and also why the guy was counting 1-2-3-5-6-7. What about 4, if there’s a 4, where’s 8?!! I learned how a couple of turns go but without the basic step (or count) down, the turns made little sense. Renee is rather experienced, at salsa, so she was in the advanced group. After the lessons, she was able to teach me how the basic step goes and how the turns all work into it. Though, I never did ask about the counting. We were the only ones from bible study that were there so I only knew her. She was well known by a number of people there. So luckily she had other people to dance with. Lucky because she didn’t have to dance all night with me and also because it gets really boring when all you know how to do is the basic step and one turn. She tried to teach me other stuff, with mixed results.

The next time there were a few more of us in our group. Doug came. Doug’s your typical masters in engineering student. Not as geeky as your typical computer science nerd but not as cool as us bio-geeks. He hadn’t been salsa dancing before but had done some swing and other stuff during the summer. We were able to teach him a little. Chansonette was there too. She’s more free spirited in her dancing that Renee. She doesn’t take leading so well but she also doesn’t wait for you to lead and then say things like “why don’t you throw a girl a turn sometime?” She also didn’t yell at me to keep my hand in the shoulder plain. Probably the most interesting way to be told to get your hand off someone’s butt. Actually it’s the only way I’ve been told that. Too bad for me I guess. I bet Tiffany has lots of good stories about grabbing people’s butts. Our friend Dan was also there. He grew up in South America so he was somewhat better than Doug and I. The band was fun too. They played some Christmas music. It was fun to hear them sing about The Grinch to a salsa beat. I think we all had a good time. Doug and I did and the girls as least pretended that they did. So it was a successful night. I wonder how much I’ll get to practice while I’m in Africa. Maybe I’ll start a salsa club in The Gambia. I bet it would go over really well.