Ten days to catch up on

Alright Muchachos, it is now Autumn, which is what it should be here, and cold enough outdoors for me not to mind sitting and typing for an hour or two. When I got home on Saturday night/Sunday morning, a mighty wind was getting up around town and as I wound down over a mug of chamomile tea and an old episode of Friends, shutters and loose cables clattered and crashed about in the light well outside the window. By the time I surfaced on Sunday, the world was fresh and damp after a night of serious weather. The water trays on the window boxes were full and the wind was still howling around. A good day for whacking up the heating and lounging around at home.

So, the last time I wrote properly in the blog, I was off for a nap then an evening at Salon Canning. Now, there is a statue of George Canning in Parliament Square so I think he was some sort of statesman. Maybe I will look him up in an encyclopaedia when I get back, so that in my next visit here I can be as informative about Canning as I was about Sunderland.... I´m sure they will be fascinated, although I doubt that anything about Canning will draw such horrified attention as my exposition of the Geordie accent. Funnily enough, Salon Canning had been mentioned to me so often as a top milonga that I found it rather disappointing. A big room, it was nonetheless very crowded, with a lot of much younger people than many of the places I have been to (these are probably the people who normally have jobs to go to, so can´t stay up all night during the week). It does have a nice floor - big, square and wooden - but the crowds made it difficult both to make the necessary eye contact to get a dance, then when that was accomplished to do anything more than milling around. The person in charge sat me at a table with a couple of other single women, one of whom looked pretty forlorn and became increasingly so over the next hour as she failed completely to get a dance. She gave up in the end and left. The other woman did much better, but she seemed to have a lot of friends there who came up and asked her to dance. It seems that the younger people do this more than the nodding method, which is a bit confusing for us foreigners and also a bit of a shame. I am a huge fan of the nodding method and have learnt not to feel guilty about extremely exaggerated and determined ways of looking away when someone I do not want to dance with is trying to catch my eye.

I did have a few dances at Canning but not many and none of them very satisfying. Even dancing with Ricardo Vidort was a bit dreary, though it was nice to chat with him. I did have one comically apalling dance with an old geezer who seemed to think that he was playing a big bandoneon, not dancing with a woman. His interesting method of leading was to push imaginary buttons on different parts of my back, expecting me to translate this into instructions for one move or another. I have come across milder forms of this before, but usually accompanied by some other more useful information through the frame. I skipped around as best I could, then at the end of the first song I said "I´m terribly sorry, this doesn´t work for me", he agreed and we gave up. It may be that he danced for decades like this with a wife who understood but for me it was utterly hopeless.

There was a demonstration by a Japanese couple in deeply curious garb. They danced as if the whole point was to show off the girl´s underwear from as many different angles as possible. Judged in those terms it was a great success and they must have worked harder than I ever will to achieve it. Actually, it might have looked good on ice but it fell short of my exacting standards for the kind of tango I want to watch. Purely a matter of taste of course and they were generally very well received. I didn´t stay long after they had danced and was probably home and in bed by three.

That was the mid-point of my stay and may well have been the low point really. It was followed by a weekend nursing a digestive system that didn´t really want to leave the flat, so I missed the last opportunities I might have had to dance with Miguel before he went off again on his travels. He told me on the phone that he had had a fantastic Saturday night at Club Sunderland, with the sickly star Carlos Rivarola doing his best to get up and dance. It was a bit depressing to have missed that but que sera, sera. It may well be that I just needed to re-charge a little.

On the Sunday afternoon, I did venture out to San Telmo to look at this famous antiques market and the general touristy shenanigans. It was fun, it has clearly grown over the years to include crafts on peripheral streets and tango music at every turn. I remembered Paddie and John taking a holiday in Cuba when neither of them really likes salsa music, coming back loathing it with a passion. I must say, anyone who doesn´t ike tango music should stay well clear of Buenos Aires as it is impossible to avoid.

After a couple of hours meandering on nothing more than an Alka Seltzer and a couple of crackers, I was suddenly starving. This coincided with passing a place called Cafe Seddon, so I went in and sat down, just as a tango singer started to croon accompanied by a much younger man on an electric piano. They were great and the perfect accompaniment to my meal, though it is hard to carry on chewing when someone is directing a tragic song right at you. Towards the end of their set, he turned one number into a sing-along and I realised that I was the only gringo in the place as everyone else knew the words. It got better; it turned into a tango karaoke. First one woman got up, clearly not a professional but powerful and well rehearsed, then her mother belted out Mi querida Buenos Aires to a huge applause. Finally, a young man got up and announced his engagement to the woman on her cell phone at his table, then he serenaded her with a magnificent theatrical number, during which I was used as a prop - probably some puta trying to lead him astray - but he held his hands to his heart and addressed the rest of the song to her, ending up on his knees with sweat pouring down his face. I caught they eye of the pianist and we shared a big laugh at all of this.

I ended up spending much of the evening there, extending my quick supper with a coffee then a glass of wine. There was a pair of fabulous tango dancers who came on from time to time and danced a couple of tunes and I chatted with them as well as the musicians. Well, I say chatted but of course that is an exaggeration! The singer was called Ruben Guerra and had some sort of history with Triollo, a top tango musician from forty or fifty years ago. The cafe itself is really nice, with high vaulted brick ceilings and a big shiny wooden floor. The bar in the centre is huge and the walls have huge dark wood and glass display cabinets, like in an old pharmacy. I put aside the nagging feeling that I hadn´t danced all weekend and just enjoyed doing something different.

By Monday, the sun was out and I had a new energy for getting the most out of the trip. Finally, I had communicated effectively with Michele´s friend Belen and arranged to meet her at Confiteria Ideal for a chinwag and an afternoon milonga. We had a nice coffee and managed with my little Spanish and her little English to discover that we both speak French, so that made conversation a lot easier. We both try to talk the hard way, then when it gets impossible, we revert to French to clear up the mess.

In fact, I have noticed while trying to get to grips with Spanish that my poor little brain is sending me all sorts of other languages when it can´t carry on in the one I want. So the languages I do have are very close to the surface: twice I have met Germans and fallen straight into speaking to them in pretty good German, despite barely having used that for twenty years or so (yikes!). The half dozen or so words of Italian that have lodged in my head over the years have made an appearance and I astonished myself and a shop assistant the other day by launching into a question in Russian. I have had no chance to use the expression "I don´t speak Hungarian" but it´s right there, ready and waiting! It is extraordinary what your brain stores up for a rainy day. It makes me wonder what else is still in there.

Anyway, we went upstairs to the milonga at Ideal and had a fine old time. I bumped into big Michael from London, whose last day it was in Bs As, and it was nice to have the chance to dance with him here. As his lovely wife doesn´t tango, she wasn´t there and he had to leave quite early to catch up with her. Ideal is probably the most obvious place to dance here, so in fact there were several people there who one or both of us knew, which made me feel very much part of the scene. We both danced a lot and I tried to take some pictures, though I kept that to a minimum. I don´t know why really, it is a touristy place so no-one would be at all surprised to see a camera. What I must do before I leave is get someone to take pictures of me dancing.

We stayed at Ideal until it closed at ten or eleven, then drifted out into the night and parted at the Obelisk with a promise to talk on the phone and meet up again later in the week. Belen said that some other English people were coming out and suggested we all meet up. It is nice to have a big old chat without struggling for words but I didn´t come out here to dance with English people, still I hope my enthusiasm was not too reserved!

Tuesday was scorchio here, so I put on a frock and some strappy sandals and went out to meet Miguel for lunch. We had a lovely time, he is so incredibly enthusiastic about his city and kept thinking of things he wanted to show off - like the different kinds of trees, his favourite old buildings, some beautiful avenue, a specialist shop - and diverting up and down the streets around his neighbourhood pointing them all out. He took me for a delicious lunch at his local restaurant and ordered some typical dishes he thought I should try, including an entree of cold roast beef with cream and tuna sauce which was interesting and of course a huge grilled steak. I kept quiet when he made some disparaging comments abut vegetarians who think they can ever understand Argentina and so really know the tango...

After lunch we had a little walk and he took me to his favourite shoe shop, which was shut, and with running commentary we went through a small arcade and into a shop selling typical Argentinian clothing. Here we had a long conversation about the relative merits of Scottish and Argentine wool, beef etc (thanks Daddy!), the wearing of kilts in such a cold country (streuth) and I was called upon again to have an opinion on Prince Charles. I said I would not want everyone in the world discussing my business, the helpful shop assistant said "but there were three people in that marriage" and happily Miguel changed the subject. Slightly surreally, he also gave me some helpful information about cotton lingerie and tried to find a shop that had a good brand. If I was relieved not to have to shop for shoes under his scrutiny, I was doubly relieved when we couldn´t find the right pants shop!

On Tuesday evening, I went to Teatro Colon to see I lombardi alla primera cruce (or something like that I don´t have the programme with me). It was fantastic, though a ludicrous confection born out of some allegory about nineteenth century Austrian politics, which may be why it hasn´t been staged in London for some time (still, they keep putting Wozzek on, which is ludicrous and crap, so what do I know.) The accoustics at the Colon really are amazing, even I could tell the difference; the clarity of the voices filling such a huge space without distortion was quite striking. To be honest I´d have happily lost the first act, as it is mostly recitative and is about an old feud between a pair of brothers, the naughty one - bass, dressed in black - ends up killing their father. By Act II none of this seems to matter, the woman they had fought over is inexplicably dead and for some reason the good brother - tenor, dressed in blue - has seen fit to leave Lombardy to its own devices and take his teenage daughter off to the crusades. Had it not been for this dubious bit of parenting, we´d have lost all the best tunes as it is the daughter who lifts the whole thing up with some gorgeous arias and a lot of good sense about the futility of such vain warmongering. After the best part of three hours, there are only two people left standing on a stage where recently-forgiven naughty brother has just died and a great pile of dead infidels lies before the burning city of Jerusalem. Powerful stuff and probably quite timely if it were to show in London or Washington.

I had nice interval chats with the couple sitting next to me, including a discussion of the relative economic situations in our two countries. Blimey!

I wasn´t quite ready to call it a night after the opera, so I ducked into a dreadful cafe by the Obelisk and have a cafecito and a plate of panquekes to keep me going. I had the foxy red shoes in my handbag and was on my way to Bohemia for a bit of a tango on the way home. Now, Bohemia advertises itself as the salon that never closes but I say that is not worth much if nobody comes! How fantastically disappointing - a group of half a dozen or so people was leaving as I arrived and that emptied the place. The women on the door were very apologetic and one of them suggested I could try going in and see what happens but I wasn´t up for sitting in an empty room hoping some lone tanguero would turn up to sweep me off my feet. I walked home and did a bit of tango homework to burn off the sugar and caffeine.

Wednesday I had a lovely long wak in the Reserva Ecologica, a big park at the edge of the city, which came about when a land reclamation project was abandoned and all sorts of flora and fauna just arrived to take it over. There is more pampas grass that you could shake a feather duster at and it is very very beautiful en masse. I may have to take a trip out to Worcester Park when I get home to see it in captivity! Bird watchers would enjoy it. It also seems to attract a lot of human mating activity, with teenagers snogging on benches and people emerging ruffled from the pampa onto the main footpath. The park goes up to the River Plata, which isn´t really a river, it is more like the Wash looking out to the North Sea. If it were a river, you´d be able to see the other side! It is a big brown expanse of water with huge container ships being tugged along it to the docks.

When I came out of the park, I hopped in a cab and got him to take me down to La Boca, the poorest neighbourhood of Bs As by the old port, home of the tango and of Maradona´s famous football team. I didn´t feel any desire to get out tof the cab and take a closer look at any of this but was glad to have seen it. The area called Caminita appears on lots of Bs As guides and is quite colourful, but it is a small tourist trap in the middle of an area where people live in decrepit houses cobbled together out of corrugated iron or old timber. It is serious poverty, although there are plenty more people in this city who are worse off and live on the streets. The driver was very interesting and made the most of a fare who just asked to be shown around the area. We drove around the Bonbonera football stadium, a big ugly concrete thing that means the world to millions of Porteños. I made some reference to the hand of God, which the driver thought hilarious.

That evening, I went to Viejo Correo, a really nice club with a great atmosphere, even if it wasn´t all that well attended. I was a bit tired after all the walking, despite my two hour nap, so was content that there were not so many people to dance with that I would want to stay out very late. The place has a lovely big floor of checkerboard ceramic tiles and the walls are an interesting eclectic mix of carpet, polystyrene tiles and some sort of "I can´t believe it´s not cobbles" stuff. This is probably something to do with the accoustics rather than an interior decorating crisis. I´d love to go back here on a slightly busier night but I am running out of nights now, so that may have to wait til my next visit.

The music was interesting, the DJ was obviously trying to break away from the standard repertiore, though he frequently failed to spot that nobody got up to dance. In Argentina, they play three or four numbers in similar style usually by the same orchestra, then break these up with a bit of disco or a comedy tango. At this point everyone sits down and you only get up again when you have secured a partner for the next set. So if the DJ chooses to put on something a bit off the wall - like four slow but jaunty tuba milongas - to which nobody responds, there is a while to wait before the next set. That aside, all my dances were good´uns, including that chap Rueben who had sent a message across to me the week before so that I would turn around and catch his eye at some other dance.

I ran out of men at about half past two, so I got down off the foxy, foxy heels and headed out for a cab.

On Thursday I met up with Belen again at Club Español. Now this is a place I wish I had discovered sooner, it is gorgeous, has a great floor, loads of people I knew and is a block and a half along the road from my apartment. Juanita was there, which was a shock as I didn´t know she was coming out here. In fact, she won a prize with her cloakroom ticket. This is a frequent thing at milongas: about three quarters of the way through, a draw is made of all the entry tickets and prizes might be a packet of biscuits, a bottle of champagne, your dinner bill or a pair of shoes from the sponsor. It is great fun and breaks things up for a couple of minutes.

Also at Español on Thursday was Oscar Acebras, the lovely tango singer who comes to London from time to time. I danced with him at Balham last year rather disastrously but happily he didn´t remember me from then and was delighted to meet me on the grounds that I am a friend of Michele´s. We danced a couple of times with much more success. He feigned astonishment that I have only been dancing a year and a half, but I am getting quite used to all these lovely compliments and take them with a pinch of salt. Rueben was there again, as was Lucy Alberto who seems to run a few of these things. They both greeted me like old friends, which is another thing I like about this place. There were a couple of tango teachers there on the lookout for foreigners, so I danced with them and took their cards, though I have no intention of going to them as I have settled on my teachers for the rest of the stay.

Belen introduced me to some other English people but not until we were leaving, so I wasn´t sitting there chatting about the weather all evening, which is a relief! We did chat a bit to some locals in the single ladies enclosure, who I hope to see again this evening. In fact there are three milongas I wanted to go to this evening, so I had better get on with this and get napping!

Club Español is lush - like an embassy or, of course, a gentlemen´s club. It has a swanky looking restaurant downstairs which I would love to try but maybe that is something to look forward to when I am here with Susan and Linda - alright ladies? The lift is in a wrought iron cage, itself not unusual in Bs As, but this one is painted with gold. There is a sweeping staircase and just adornment and marble, marble everywhere. The milonga was very crowded when we got there but happily thinned out later on as the afternoon crowd sloped off to their steakhouses.

Oh, that has made me hungry!

Right, my teachers are a sweet young couple called Romina and Carlos, who were recommended by Dan and Judy. I have been going to public classes here and there, which has been interesting and useful but really I needed to get some serious, personal and sustained attention. So I´ve been to them every day exept Sunday and will continue to do so until I leave. Romina works with me on technique and we giggle a lot whan I keep making the same mistakes. Slowly, I think I am ironing out some of my worst flaws but there are plenty more to go. Then I dance with Carlos and they both observe and correct what I am doing. It really is the best attention I could get and ridiculously good value. I´d recommend them to anyone. I have to say I always knew that Leroy, our London teacher, was good but now that I have been here and experienced a lot of different styles, I appreciate just how good he is. I only wish more English men would come to his classes and take advantage of what he has to give.

On Friday, I had another day out walking around; this time in the parks of Palermo. There is a botanical garden there, which sounds grand but is only as big as my local park in Vauxhall and is bordered by some seriously busy roads. It is no Kew Gardens but it does have some fab trees and a huge population of cats. The mosquitoes from my apartment must have caled ahead to warn their brethren that I was coming and I was pursued as by demons. So I gave up on that park and went across to the zoo. I had expected to find it a bit depressing, as zoos so often are, and without the company of a small child to brighten up the experience it didn´t seem promising. But in fact I liked it so much I spent the rest of the afternoon there. True, one or two of the animals looked unimpressed - the polar bear and the condor seemed suicidal for example - and many of them had tiny spaces to live in but there wasn´t a hint of ropiness in their eyes or in their fur and for the most part the animals were pretty perky. Maybe the ropey ones are swiftly transferred to the parilla. The zoo also has some lovely buildings and is set out in a very pleasing way. When it closed, there was some sort of craft market going on outside, so I had a meander along that before ging home for my nap.

I misfired for a second time that week in my choice of milonga, going to a place that was on the tango map and in Tangauta but which turned out to have a disco on that evening. I took a look inside and though the building was rather lovely, the disco was heaving with people so I made a hasty retreat and was glad I had left the business of drinking coffee until I was actually there this time.

Four hours typing but I´m nearly there!

Saturday, what did I do on Saturday? Who knows! In the evening I went to Club Gricel again, which was celebrating some anniversary or birthday and all decked out with balloons and banners. Carlos and Romina had beeked a table to get some of their students dancing in a social setting and it was fun to meet some new people. I spent much of the non-dancing time chatting with a lovely Australian lady whose name I have rather disgracefully forgotten. She was there with her partner Barry, a very enthusiastic ex-ballroom champ and a lovely dancer. I had possibly the worst ever dance with a strange and slighty smelly old chap whose lead was a total mystery to me. I tried to make my excuses after one number but he refused to let me go! So I was stuck with him for the rest of that set and try as I might, I could not get anything out of it at all and skipped and tripped around with - apparently - a right old face on me.

So, back to Sunday, when it got cold and windy and I stayed indoors most of the day. I did venture out for a walk late in the afternoon just to brush away the cobwebs and feel like I had actually had a day. I strolled across to the swanky part of the centre, where I think Michael & Oswaldo stayed in Feb. Ooo-er! Still, coming from Knightsbridge I´m sure they felt right at home. There is an arcade that has all the designer shops from Sloane Street and a few fur shops that beggar belief. One called Breeders has a window display of the most gaudy fur coats dyed day-glo colours; inside, a tiny stick of a woman was trying on a jacket so hideous it had to be high fashion. Anyway, that´s not really my thing, so I doubled back towards home and - you guessed it - had a little nap.

When I went out it was to a place that has been on my list all this timeand has also been mentioned pretty often so I was keen to see it, though hpoing it would not turn out to be another Canning. Porteño yBailarin is a great place, the music was lovely, I had some great dances and rather stunning company at my table in the form of Beatrice, a Uruguayan lady who comes over every month to get her fix of the tango. We chatted quite a bit, mostly in Spanish I have to say as she has a lovely understandable accent. Most of the time though she was dancing and with the amount of time she must have spent getting herself ready and manouevring herself into that dress, I should bloody well think so! Just remembered what I did on Saturday - I spent the afternoon at a hairdresser gettting all the old layers of l´Oréal stripped out and something a bit more uniform in its place. Well, I´m worth it! Came out with the sleakest, shiniest Barbie hair ever. Now I know how they do it but I don´t suppose I will rush to have that again, it is a shock to see myself in windows and mirrors looking coiffed.

Anyway, Porteño y Bailarin was top. I had a couple of bad, bad dances and realised that both were with people nobody in the know will dance with. This is where being adept at ignoring potential partners comes in - once you know you don´t want to dance with them, all sorts of details in the environment become worthy of inspection in an OTT show of looking the other way. It wasn´t terribly busy but there were enough people to keep me dancing til half past three and I could have stayed longer, except that I knew I had to get up this morning for my class at eleven.

So here we are, it is today, Monday. This time next week I will be back in London. Boo! I do miss people of course but I am not really looking forward to going home and I´m sorry boys but I am not really looking forward to dancing with the English men. I wish they would come out here and catch the fire of the tango and learn to choose decent aftershave, be more charming, be less embarrassed and dance better - yes, that is selfish of me but I think they would enjoy it too.

Now, I really need a nap!

Tonight I will go to one or two places, depending on how much power the nap gives me. I have pushed back the times of my lessons this week as I think I will try to fit in as much dancing as my feet can stand but should probably do some shopping too or nobody gets any souvenirs, including me!

I hope that satisfies the people who have badgered me for more news... I am not about to read it through, so I hope it all makes sense.

Adios chicos!