No spaghetti arms!

Life in Central America is as typically loud, musical and dancey as one might expect. Salsa and bachata music can be heard almost constantly, and going out at night always involves dancing. It´s like a GAA club disco all over again, waiting for a boy to ask you dance. At least there are no slow sets.

So, in an effort to try and not look like a tourist (who am I kidding?), I´ve been going to dance classes, along with my three housemates. We go to a dance studio at the end of our street and have a private class, which costs €8 each. We got an amazing deal. Apparently. But who knows? There´s no such thing as a straightforward price here. We had two teachers for the four of us the first day, and four teachers for the four of us the second day. As almost all dancing here is done in pairs, it´s totally necessary to have a teacher dance with you. If I could make mine dance with me in the nightclub all night too, I´d be thrilled. He tells you what to do and knows what you can do and leads strongly so with him I do spins and all these moves I can´t do otherwise.

Salsa is all about reading your partner´s prompts so that you can follow him, like a misogynistic sign language where the man talks and the woman only listens. As you might imagine, that is a struggle for me. I do like it though. Except when a bad dancer asks you to dance. Then it´s a painful three minutes until you can go back to your friends and tell them how crap he was. But in general it´s great, and I can´t wait until I can do this:

But bachata is what it´s really all about here. Bachata is pretty repetitive, and not helped by the fact that they listen to the same songs over and over and over again. Like, I´ll hear the same song four or five times in one day, just on the street. Bachata can be pretty boring to dance to - two steps to the right, two to the left, a few turns here and there, but that´s probably more of a reflection on me and my dance partners than the style. A lot of guys dance in a really casual, too cool for school kind of way. Like someone told them to take their grandma out for a spin on the dancefloor. Why bother asking a girl to dance if they´re gonna be that boring? Nobody´s paying them. I think.

The Dominicans are particularly crazy about this guy Romeo Santos (link in the comments because I can´t figure out html code), and every second song is by him. There are other guys too, but they all sound largely the same, earnestly singing about love, or in the case of our Romeo, about sneaking into a girl´s room and declaring her his. Those Latin romantics.