I Know Nothing

Lots and lots of people will tell you what Buenos Aires is like. I will tell you two things only. The truth is that nothing anyone says can prepare you for the reality-forget anything you ever thought you knew about tango or Buenos Aires. The other thing is that you must go to Buenos Aires: it's a beautiful place to be and it is without doubt the Mecca of tango.

It's really true. There are people here that are so good that most dancers and even teachers in the USA don't have the knowledge to evaluate their ability. All they might ever notice is the number of people that come by their table to pay respects, and the very few people they visit to pay respects. I will say one thing more about dancers native to Buenos Aires: with all due respect, being old does not make a milonguero a good dancer.

As far as what's going on with me, I've taken a couple of classes and gone to one practica and a bunch of milongas.

Of the classes, one was at the Club Español and the others at the Dinzels space on Jufre street a couple of blocks off Avenida Scalabrini Ortiz. I won't say much about the classes except that they were pretty basic. At the Club Español, there were more women showing up for the pre-milonga class than men, and I ended up being a dance dummy for the women that showed up, leading what felt like a few hundred front ochos. The class at Los Dinzels was led by an assistant teacher there (excellent, excellent dancer, she was), and was, in it's way, quite nice for beginners--they covered technique of walking forwards and backwards, foot agility drills, partner exercises and taught a figure or 2 (which I have pretty much forgotten).

I've been to enough tourist milongas now, I'm starting to see a lot of the same characters over and over again. Some of them, I'm not so sure are nice people. Theres a guy with a bad haircut, sideburns and protruding eyes that I get a bad vibe from, and another guy who was the host at one milonga that showed up at another milonga a few nights looking pretty drunk.

Most of the milongas have been hard to get dances at. If you go to a tourist milonga like Niño Bien or Porteño y Bailarin, you'll see a lot of guys cruising around looking for dances. That's something I have yet to become comfortable with doing myself. That's because the places aren't all that well suited for milongas, and likely because the seating arrangements are completely random--you can grab any table that's available. So you have to go around looking for available partners.

Niño Bien happens at the Centro Region Leonesa (the Lion's Club), which is a gigantic space (for Iowa Citians, think three times the size of the Old Brick), so you can't make eye contact so easily. Also, at Niño Bien, people tend to dance mostly with people from their own table. Porteño y Bailarin has 2 small dance floors in two different rooms. Last night, the old milongueros were all in the front room, and the younger people were in the back room. It's crowded and poorly laid out, and there are posts in the way. I will say, there were a lot of dancers there who at least looked confident in what they were doing.

On the other hand, at a few milongas quite a few more women than men show up, or enough tourists show up during the year that the milonga is in general foreigner friendly. There was an afternoon milonga Wednesday at Canning where I snagged a few dances, Club Español has a lot of women and I got a lot of dances there. I was able to get a dance pretty quickly at El Arranque, and it looked pretty promising until I ripped the seat of my pants on the back of a chair and had to beat a hasty retreat.

I also went to one other milonga with some friends, La Baldosa, way the heck out in the sticks (I don't remember the name of the neighborhood, but it was a 20 minute or more drive from Palermo Soho where I am). It's a barrio milonga, the way it used to be in the Golden Age of Tango. All ages and all abilities show up, including families. I sat and watched (foreigners just don't get dances at milongas like that). There was one old lady pointed out to me as a stellar dancer, who must've been dancing for 70 years or more, that had the most precise, minimal and clean footwork I've ever seen. Returning to the beginning of this post, I have to admit I wouldn't have picked her out as a great dancer until I was told what to look for.

Tomorrow, I'm going to get up, have lunch, practice walking in the apartment for an hour or so, go to the practica at the Dinzels for a few hours, and then at 8:00 PM, take my first private lesson in Buenos Aires. After that, I will have dinner with my teacher Roberto and my hostess Deby Novitz, and then we're going to Gricel to dance. I've decided to take classes mostly for social purposes, and I will take mostly privates.

The pictures are thr front doors 2 to of the milongas I've been to; the first is 'La Nacional', which is at an old Italian social club, and the the other is of Centro Region Leonesa (El Niño Bien).

BA Tip #3: Legitimate cabs here are black and yellow and have a red sign that says "LIBRE" in white letters in the upper corner of the window on the passenger side. Wait curbside for one that has its sign lit, then wave a hand at them. Cabbies here don't seem to know block numbers, so most likely they will need to know the cross street, as in "Corrientes y Esmeralda". Sometimes, you will need to give them the name of the last major thoroughfare on the way there. By the way, 95% of the streets here go in one direction only, so you must take different routes to and from a given destination: make sure you know the last bit of your route home.

BA Tip #4: Good dancers don't go to practicas: they find a partner at their level and practice in their living room or rent studio space (unless they are kids and can't afford to rent studio space). If you aren't a good dancer, you need to go to practicas, you can't get what you need from just going to the milongas and classes. The good ones that I know about are the ones run by Los Dinzels and Pablo Nieves. Los Dinzels is in fact a great bargain: 80 pesos a month gets you 6 day a week access: 2 days a week it goes from 10:00 am to 10:00 pm and the rest of the time it's open for six hours. It's close by to where I am in Palermo.

I Made It

El Aeroplano

After a 2 hour ride and lunch with my mother at Reagan National Airport, I got on my flight to Miami. If they had supplied oil, we would all have known true sardinehood, is all I have to say. That, and that I would be a very fat sardine.

I waited around in Miami for 2 hours, and then got luck because the seat next to me wasn't occupied so I had a bit of extra room to stretch out in. I spent a fair amount of time reading and tried to sleep a few hours under the aggressively minimal pillow and blankie American Airlines supplied.

Getting out of Ezeiza at 6:30 am was easy. First, immigration. You have to have the paperwork filled out and they look at your passport, put a stamp in it and wave you though. After immigration you go though a hallway lined with duty-free shops. It opens out into the baggage pickup area. Then you pick up your bags and go though customs. Customs ran everything though their x-ray machines, and sent me through.

After a long taxi drive I arrived at my hosts house about 8:30 am BA time. I am staying with Deby Novitz, who now lives and works in BA. She's great, highly opinionated but a very warm and openhearted lady. She's having to deal with a broken hip she got in a car accident, which is lucky for me or she'd be teaching in Europe with her friend Roberto, who I got to meet last night over a 10:00 pm dinner. I'm glad to be staying at her place as she very freely shares her knowledge and access as an insider in the BA tango scene.

We had lunch at a neighborhood parilla (traditional barbecue place). Food in BA is excellent. They don't drench everything in sauces, and it's all very fresh and ripe. For 31 pesos we got a quarter of a chicken, six inches of chorizo (sausage) and about 12 ounces of pork, a huge quantity of french fries, salad with olive oil and vinegar (no such thing as ranch or blue cheese here), some black olives marinated with garlic and bread. More than we could eat, really.

Then we went to have me fitted for shoes by a lady named Leo, who makes shoes for all the shows as will as many of the great stars. Deby rates her quality as 5 stars. I'm getting a pair of plain black oxfords and a pair of 2 tone brown shoes. They will be ready on the 22nd.

I'm off now to the corner store to get lunch, a phone card to put minutes on the cell phone Deby gives with the apartment, the Brazilian Consulate to get a visa for my return trip through Rio and to take my first Spanish lesson. At 4:00 pm I will go to a milonga at Salon Canning, which is about 12 blocks away.

I wasn't able to take a picture out the window of the lights of BA at night, the captain had said to turn off all electronic devices and I was about 8 feet away from the chief steward. But I have a picture out the window of Deby's place. On the other side of the trees is the Plate river.

BA TIP #1: Avoid changing money at the brightly lit blue and white booths with attractive young people in them in the baggage pickup area ... they offer an exchange rate of 2.74 pesos to the dollar. If you change US$100.00, you will be gving away over 30 pesos. Instead, change money at the Banco Nacional office immediately to the right of the exit from customs, which offered a real world exchange rate of 3.07 pesos to the dollar.

BA TIP #2: When you come out of the customs area, tons of people will be in your facescreaming at you for a taxi. Don't even look at them, they will want 75 to 100 pesos or more. Go direcly to the Taxi Ezeiza booth, they charged me 53 pesos. Remember to tip your portero a couple of pesos and your driver 2-4 pesos.

I'm outa here!!

It's really going to happen. I have the ticket to fly, and a fresh passport in hand. USians don't need a visa for Argentina (how kind of them to admit such a disreputable crowd for free).

What will happen as this rumpled, plumpish, bespectacled gringo tanguero hits Buenos Aires for an 8 week orgy of tango? I have no clue, all I know is I hope something will be different on the other side of this, in mid-August.

Yes, I will come back with more tango music than I will ever need (except for Keith Elshaw's cleaned up stuff), a few pairs of tango shoes, a leather jacket heavy enough to stop small caliber bullets, and maybe even a cool pinstripe suit that won't wrinkle so much in the embrace.

But hey, that's pretty external and kind of shallow. What I really want to know is, what's it like after you pack 500+ hours of tango into 8 weeks? I've been living on the fumes of 1/2 an hour with a good partner here, a workshop there, for so long that the thought of 8 to 10 hours of tango a day for almost 2 months just fires my brain.

Between now and the time I leave, I'm taking suggestions for teachers. classes and practicas. Have at it in the comments section between now and the 12th.