Swing Time!

Aquest dissabte, BALL!!! announced tthe message in my inbox. And due to my extensive knowledge of Catalan, I knew that it meant that this Saturday, that there would be a DANCE!! It's funny to me, however, that "ball" literally means dance because I still look at it and think, "there's going to be a ball?" and then I start to wonder where I can find some glass slippers. Or Mr. Darcy.

Anyhow, I got this illustrious invitation because I'm enrolled in some swing classes for while I'm here in Barcelona at the school of Jorge. That's not the name of the school, it's just the name of the guy who teaches the classes. All of them. They're not the greatest dances classes ever, but I don't mind too much. For dances classes, they weren't too expensive, I get some exercise, and I get to sort of meet some people. Oh, and I get to learn the numbers 1-8 in Catalan really well.

The dance tonight was to celebrate the beginning of the new set of classes and it was free for students (or maybe for anybody, I don't know, I don't read Catalan THAT well...) so I went. I didn't have anything else to do and I've been meaning to go out swing dancing here. I knew it was primarily a dance for students at this school, but I didn't expect that it would really be only those people. Maybe I suspected it, but didn't dwell on it too much because I was hoping there would be other people who had other experience besides what they'd learned under Jorge's tutelage. Unfortunately, the dancer's were mostly intermediate beginners practicing the small range of steps they had learned so far. I only danced a few dances with people I already knew from class.

But the location... I have no idea what this place was. It was at the second to last stop on one of the metro lines and walking to the place from the metro station, I coudl tell it was an area where a lot of immigrants live, but it was pretty hoppin'. There was some kind of concert going on in a pavillion right next to the metro and some shops buzzing with customers lining the oother side of the street. I found the Casal Prospe (apparently short for prosperity) and it looked like there was a children's birthday party going on, but peering carefully through the building's window, it looked like there was another room off the back where there might be some swing dancing going on.

As the dancing picked up, some of the kids from the birthday party became interested in what was going on and flooded to the doorway. Soon, four little couples of five year olds had formed. They swayed back and forth hand in hand and even tried a few turns. Others just jumped and twirled. It was really cute. At first. Those kids went back to their party, but then they returned with more friends, and they danced more and more frenetically. They were all wearing little plastic headbands with streamers flowing down from two antennae. They bopped and rocked and rolled and frollicked and skipped. And then in great numbers they discovered the small stage at the front of the room and they swarmed it. One of them decided he liked throwing himself off the edge of it as hard as he could and sliding out towards the middle of the dance floor. I've never been at a swing dance where I had to be careful not to literaly trod on a child before. As I suspected, as it got later, the crowd of kids thinned out, but this left me seriously asking myself, what was this place that we were at? Back in the main room, there was a bar and a number of tables, but you couldn't really call it a bar, I don't think. Would you have a five year old's birthday party at a bar? Maybe a community center with light food service? Maybe that's what it was, because the room that we were in was obviously a small theater. Okay, mystery solved. I think.

I spent most of my evening sitting on the front of the stage (after we reclaimed it in the name of grown-up sanity). About halfway through the evening, a tall guy in a black shirt wandered in and sat down next to me. Every once in a while, one of us would look at the movies being projected on the screen behind us, but it looked to the other person like we were looking at them, which was slightly awkward. Eventually, we started talking. He told me he'd just started swing dancing, and so he wasn't going to dance because he'd ony had three lessons. Really, he came to watch and listen to the music. He claimed that that would help him learn. He told me that he is an expert in Argentine Tango, so he knows a thing or two about dancing. He filled me in on some places to dance tango in town. Hmm... tempting... We chatted off and on for the remainder of the evening which kept me from being completely bored. He paid me some compliments about my dancing and said a lot of things that I didn't understand, but I nodded my head anyway if I thought they didn't matter. I drank an entire bottle of sparkling water. It was called Vichy Catalan.

On the way home, I got a craving for salt and vinegar potato chips. I stopped in a little convenience store but they didn't have any. I bought roast chicken with lemon and thyme flavor instead. They had a very authentic flavor. My fingers still smell like chicken. Speaking of chicken, I don't eat much of it here. This is surprising because it's probably the primary meat I eat at home. But the other day, I realized that I couldn't remember the last time I ate chicken. (I remember now). But it's been a little while. So maybe you don't want to trust my judgment on the authenticity of the chip flavor after all ;)

Evenings of dancing like this can make the reasons why I like to go out dancing seem a little fuzzy, but I still got to 1.) see a different part of town, 2.) see an old woman wearing a tinsel antennae headband 3.) learn a new Charleston step, 4.) find out about Argentine tango in Barcelona 5.) practice my Spanish a bit 6.) dance the jitterbug stroll (which I'm strangely obsessed with right now--and amused that Jorge calls it the "eeyodee yodee") 7.) eat meat flavored potato chips and so on and so forth. Not a bad evening, just a night of mediocre dancing. At least it wasn't lots of mediocre dancing. That probably would have been worse :)

Anyway, until next time. Keep dancin'. Or doing anything else that makes time not dancing bearable.

Adèu!