Trying to keep up with Spanish, a salsa combination and, one day later, Barcelona's weather.
Actually practising Spanish
My Spanish teacher had given me a few ideas for things I could do outside of class if I actually wanted this whole learning Spanish thing to work.
One of them was going to a language meetup.
So, for once, I immediately followed good advice.
The idea was pretty simple: people showed up wanting to practise Spanish, German, English or whatever language they were currently struggling with, and we just talked. It actually went surprisingly well. At some point we even started talking about whether I could teach a little salsa session there in the future while everyone tried to speak Spanish.
Sadly, I haven't been back since.
So that part of the plan is going... not extremely well.
What I did stick with was what came next.
Trying to keep up
Mixtapeplay
AA song
I had signed up for a Salsa Fusion class close to where I live a mix of Cuban and LA style, and wow, that class actually challenged me.
The whole lesson was basically one long sequence packed with different ideas, and remembering long combinations is already not exactly one of my strengths.
I'm still not a huge fan of that particular way of teaching. We spent most of the class drilling the same strict sequence over and over again, which sometimes makes me feel like I'm learning choreography more than learning how to dance.
How I would teach it differently
What I struggle with isn't the difficulty of the class, but the way the combination is taught.
We usually learn three, four or five counts at a time and immediately attach them to everything that came before. Then we repeat that exact sequence again and again until everyone knows what's coming next.
And that works really well if the goal is to dance that sequence.
The follower already knows what is supposed to happen, and the leader knows exactly where everything is going. That makes a lot of things easier.
But it also means you can get through the combination without really learning how to lead each individual part.
Sometimes I notice that I can do a move perfectly when it appears in the sequence, but if you asked me to start it from somewhere completely different, I'd first have to figure out how to get there.
That's the part I personally miss.
I'd rather learn movements as smaller, independent pieces. How can I enter this from different positions? What actually tells my partner what I want? What can come before it, and where can I go afterwards?
And then I'd want people to experiment with those pieces without knowing exactly when they're coming.
For me, that's where learning choreography and learning to dance start becoming two different things.
And I think that's simply where my idea of teaching clashes a little with his.
But the teachers absolutely knew what they were doing.
There was so much detail hidden inside every movement. Where a hand went, how the fingers were placed, tiny changes in position that suddenly made the whole thing work better. If you paid attention, there was a lot to take from it.
And somehow, despite spending quite a lot of the class wondering whether my brain was ever going to remember all of this, I made it to the end.
I'll put a video here of the combination we learned that week.
Something I found for myself
One thing I'm actually quite proud of is that I found this little Latin jazz night completely by myself.
Every Tuesday, in the cellar of a bar, there was this small concert that slowly became one of those places in Barcelona that felt a little bit like mine. Not because I knew anyone there, but because I had found it, liked it, and kept coming back.
That mattered more to me than I expected.
It made me feel a little less like someone just passing through the city. I wasn't only following recommendations anymore or going wherever someone else took me. I had started to collect my own places.
And this was one of them.
The music itself was supposed to be relaxing, but I never really managed to just sit there quietly.
There'd be a woman singing in Spanish, practically shouting her happiness into the room while moving with the rhythm, or the guy on the congas would completely disappear into a solo, and suddenly sitting still felt like the least natural thing I could do.
The cellar was cramped and usually full. People stood wherever they could get a better look at the band, others squeezed onto couches with a glass of wine, and somewhere in between all of them I would try to claim maybe one square metre of floor.
Enough to move a little.
Enough to dance on my own.
I'd love to show you photos from that first night. Unfortunately, I'd forgotten my camera, and the phone photos are bad enough that I refuse to pretend otherwise.
You'll get the good ones next week, when Simon joins me.
Tiny spoiler.
By the time I eventually left, I was exhausted. It had been one of those evenings where one thing had simply rolled into the next without much room in between.
But I also walked home knowing I'd found somewhere I wanted to come back to.
And I did.
Barcelona is not built for this
The next evening I met Mateo, even though we both already knew the weather probably wasn't going to be great. He still talked me into climbing the hill, because if this dude loves one thing, it's walking.
To be fair, thanks to him we got the lovely cover picture for this chapter. If I'd known how the evening would end, though, I probably would have tried a little harder to convince him to sit in a bar instead.
For a while, his plan worked out pretty well. The view over Barcelona was beautiful, the rain stayed away and we had enough time to enjoy being up there.
On the way back down, the weather finally caught up with us. The rain got heavy enough that we ended up hiding under a small shelter and waiting there for almost an hour.
Even under the roof we were slowly getting wet, so at some point I pulled out my camera and started taking photos of Mateo instead.
Turns out a rainy shelter isn't the worst place for a little photoshoot.
When the rain eased a little, we decided to take our chance and continue down. It didn't stay calm for long, and by that point I was mostly done with the whole adventure and just wanted to get home.
I made it to Line 4 and thought I'd finally escaped the rain. Shortly afterwards, water started coming into the station and the whole thing was closed. Everyone had to get out again.
Barcelona really isn't built for that much rain at once.
Getting home turned into a mix of buses, another metro line and trying to figure out which parts of the public transport system were still running. Around the same time, a regional warning went out telling people to stay indoors.
Cami and I had spoken shortly before, and she immediately messaged me asking where I was and how I was getting home.
Which was very sweet.
Slight problem: I didn't really know either.
Almost an hour and a half after leaving Mateo, I finally made it home completely soaked.
Rain in Barcelona: not particularly funny.
And unfortunately, I wasn't done learning that yet.
At the table
Nothing said yet.
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