Baby's First Milonga

6/4

At 7pm our group met at Gaby's house for our second tango class. We reviewed the basic steps and went onto learning how to add personality to our dancing (such as the woman rubbing the man's leg with her heels after a certain step the man does? I'm still pretty confused but that's apparently how it's done). After a few hours, we were (apparently) ready for the big league- an actual Milonga! We walked over to a modern-ish Milonga around 9:30pm for a night of dinner and dancing. I say modern-ish because it wasn't the traditional "man nods in woman's direction and woman signals yes by a twitch in her neck and then man stands up and walks over to woman and woman can't look at other men until he approaches her" milonga, but there were a lot of older people at this Milonga. I figure Gaby planned it this way so that certain people in our group wouldn't get distracted by the beautiful young Argentine men and women in this town.

We started off with dinner and I ordered a 3 course meal of eggplant parmesan, a pumpkin and tomato entree, and apple pie with ice cream and (of course!) dulce de leche. Sutton and I split a nice bottle of Argentine wine (it was very good wine at only 8 USD a bottle) and enjoyed it so much that the rest of our group ordered two more bottles for the table.

Apple pie! Ice Cream! Dulce de Leche! 

And wine, of course.

Milongas are a great way to learn how to tango (and show off your skills) because the first 2 hours are dedicated to professional tango dancers teaching you the steps in either beginner, intermediate, or advanced classes on the dance floor. Our group was put in the intermediate class, and we reviewed the basic steps and learned how to walk with different partners by rotating often. Out of the 7 partners, I encountered one older man who was really good at leading and thus made my struggle through the steps enjoyable. After the class, the teachers did a short performance showing us what an actual tango should look like. They then opened the dance floor to everyone else to practice their moves to traditional music. After a few songs, an Electronic Tango band came out on the stage and played music "the younger tango generation" dances to. In the video, the man in the center is playing a bandoneón, an instrument typically used for tango music. Thus, we got the full Milonga experience: food, music, and dancing!