Milonga and Dracula

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Today I got my certificate for the courses I took here in Baires. During this last week, I attended classes of the C1 level, which consisted mainly of heated discussions about complex and philosophic topics. Our teacher loved to provoke us by generalising and exaggerating our arguments (I know a few people who would have loved these classes). In our class we were 3 Swiss, 2 from the USA, and 2 Brazilians with quite different opinions about suicide, freedom, the duties of the government, and Spanish grammar. We also read and discussed the story 'Abenjacán el bojarí, muerto en su laberinto' by J. L. Borges. It's an interesting text, but not my favourite story by Borges. Anyway, the funniest texts are the ones that contain English words such as Yale ('Shale'😉, google ('gogle'😉 or Phoenix (no, I can't pronounce it the way they do it here).
I also met 2 girls here at school who work in similar fields as I will during my thesis. Thus, I've already contacts in Sweden and California.

Wednesday was the tango day: first I had my private lesson. Since my teacher is a cool, open-minded elderly tanguero, we danced almost the whole hour to the electronic tango CD that I had bought last week. We both forgot about time and place until we got interrupted by señor Mayoral, the owner of the school, who definitively didn't enjoy this kind of music ('the only real tango is the one written and played by Piazzolla'😉 :-) Later I participated in the group lessons with handsome Matías (it's entertaining to watch the women admiring him because he's good-looking and the men because they would like to be able to dance the way he does). After classes, Robert (USA), Emma (UK), and I went to a Milonga (La Viruta), where we saw the world champions of 2010 and a championship for amateurs. And of course we danced some tangos. My first Milonga experience was a little embarrassing since the first guy who wanted to dance with me danced quite well, but he didn't lead and I ended up guessing what he wanted to do. But Robert and the following guys (well, señores) saved my reputation in the porteñan tango scene :-) Everybody, young and old, elegant and casual, business man and artist goes to the Milongas and the precision, expression, passion, and the always present nostalgia were impressive. There were many couples, but we could also observe the very traditional way of dancing tango (2 men), as well as the most modern (2 women). Watching, dancing, and drinking a nice Argentinian wine we staid until 4pm. Thus, Thursday was the first time I arrived late at school (but I still got only 3.5h of sleep).

Yesterday, 2 girls from school and I watched the musical Dracula, THE Argentinian musical. It's spectacular, amazing, and great! It's a huge show with very good singers and actors. It's broadway-like but one definitely sees the Argentinian influence: it's effusive, very direct and explicit, passionate and sexy. Although we understood more or less the lyrics, the story was just too complicated and too many people were involved. Thus, we're not sure about what happened exactly and why, but it was awesome anyway. The rest of the night I spent discussing about everything under the sun (sense of life, religion, reality, free will etc) with a porteño (but this time I made it to school on time).

Today I'll have to pack my stuff before going one last time to the tango classes (I got invited by the owners) and tomorrow we'll have big dinner at Marini's and party one last time. Next stop: Córdoba again.

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