So instead of my typical night out, on Saturday night I went to a Salsa bar in Tel Aviv. The last time I went salsa dancing I was in Uruguay and I had no idea what the instructor was saying, and I knew this would be the case here as well. The beauty of going to these lessons though is that you don’t need to understand a word. That is what I love about dancing, you can walk into any studio or bar in the world and it doesn’t matter what language you speak, you just dance. Needless to say I was extremely excited about this excursion.
Motti and his cousin Ami picked me up at 9:30 for our night out. When we walked into the bar, a woman on the microphone speaking Hebrew faster than an auctioneer began to test my “who needs language when you have dance theory”, but I took a deep breath and realized she was just telling us to practice on our own until the lesson began. I showed Motti the salsa steps I knew (yes, all 5 of them haha) and then they split us up into groups for the lessons. We stood in a circle and once we had some moves down we switched around partners and I began to get nervous that my translator was on the other side of the circle, but I just watched the instructor and was able to mimic his moves without understanding a work that came out of his mouth. The people speaking to me in the circle probably thought I was mute, or perhaps just really rude, but what are you gonna do? The lesson went on for an hour (which was good since any longer and the creepy guy that kept staring at me and telling me I was pretty might have received a punch to the jaw), then the lights went down and it was time to dance! Motti and I had a blast dancing around and trying to pretend we were as good as the AMAZING professionals we shared the dance floor with ( I am sure you can imagine the level of pretending was pretty high). All in all a FABULOUSLY fun evening.
Sunday evening was much more low key but just as fun! I finally did some actual celebrating of the holiday I am on vacation for. My friend Tamar had a Sukkah out on her beautiful balcony and I had dinner there along with 14 other people. Tamar, whose normal cooking repertoire includes toast and salad, made a fantastic meal and my friends and I stuck around until 1 in the morning, drinking wine and enjoying the company.
My days since then have been VERY difficult. I have been waking up at 11 and heading over to the beach until 4. I come home do a little work then I make dinner with friends then we go out for the night/morning. It is a ROUGH life let me tell you. J. On Monday night we went to karaoke night at a bar, which was a lot of fun! They put the words to the songs on a big screen so everyone can sing along which I think was a fantastic idea. So I was singing along in Hebrew but I had ABSOLUTELY NO IDEA what I was saying. After that we went to an underground dance bar where the DJ was playing trance music. I saw some of the strangest dance moves I have ever seen, not to mention…wait for it…the return of the running man. Oh dear. Very entertaining though I must say and I felt like a true Israeli going to bed at 5:30 in the morning.
Well time to get back to working hard. More updates to come….
