Salsa, baby!

Last week I went to my first salsa course in Singapore! The instructor checked my level and assigned to Salsa 3. The group was quite big, more than 10 couples and several extra ladies… as usual. The class was 1’5 hours, so we could really benefit from the dancing! Bernard, the instructor, did some good footwork warm-up including some advances shines! The salsa routines’ terminology differs here to what I have been used to so I was improvising a lot and relying on my dancing intuition… I wasn’t the only one though, so I wasn’t too worried. Bernard went through the more sophisticated footwork and after about 30 mins he moved to partner work. The routine he taught was very nice, most of the dancers managed to follow it. Unfortunately there was no fiesta after the class; usually there is social dancing afterwards, but next week definitely!

People in class were very open and friendly! I must admit it was very nice as after 2 months here I have an impression that a lot of people here ‘become friendly’ after you get to know them first, so it was lovely to meet some new people who are more forward and chatty at the first contact. Maybe it’s just how the dancers are, socializing comes easier to people who dance as they usually go out regularly… The instructor was really easy-going and funny as well; he created a nice atmosphere in class. Reminded me of Fintan actually… Here I go again, I must be missing my Cork salsa people…

New salsa dancers in town!

Dinner, cinema and salsa dancing… Perfect plan! We pay the entrance fee; I can already hear salsa beats… my feet are moving! We order mojitos and Cuba Libre and the band is getting on stage. Our friend Christine finds a table right beside the band, very close to the dance-floor, great job!

The dance-floor is quite small considering the size of the club, it seems that it is really a challenge to find a proper dance-floored venue for the dance addicts not only in Ireland, but once the musicians start their hot bachata it does not seem to be an issue! It gets full of couples moving smoothly to the rhythmic timing of the bongos. My first thought, they know bachata, that’s a good start! I wasn’t really sure what the salsa scene was like in Singapore, so I was a little anxious to start dancing here. Several salsa pieces later I get more and more comfortable, the songs sound familiar and so are the moves on the dance-floor. I must admit Herve did not loose his salsa moves, so I profit from it almost all evening…

Funny thing, I watched people dancing and I danced with several partners that night and I noticed something disturbingly familiar… One of my Asian salsa partners had a lead that resembled Pratheesh’es lead and another one I watched on the dance-floor looked like the Asian version of Fintan… That’s really weird… Maybe I just miss my salsa crowd I got into back in Ireland, but it made me feel a little more at ease. Great night, excluding 45min of taxi searching at the end of it, not so easy to find one after midnight apparently…

On our second salsa night we had some Korean food and we took a taxi to get to the ‘Pinguin Can Dance’ studio. Our friend Ion knows one of the instructors there so we get in easy, on the 14th floor of the industrial building in the south of Singapore. It’s not too busy yet, but the dance-floor is quite big. It is a theme party, ‘Black&White’… The level of dancing is a little different, we could see there were more students of the dance school practicing their routines there. It didn’t put us off though, we had great dancing night again, learned some new moves… I had another flashback though, among all the Asian dancers I saw the local equivalent of Ciaran, very similar lead… This time it was easier to get a taxi, we are home before 2am.

I think it will take some time before we discover all the salsa places here and decide which ones we like best, but for now we will just enjoy discovering Singapore-salsa-social…