?>

Posts Tagged ‘dancing’

4th November
2011
written by Justin

Since we had a full week in Hong Kong, we made sure to find the local swing scene and go to the dances.  There are two regular dances per week in Hong Kong, run by Hong Kong Swings, and we went to both.  The first was a Sunday dance at a BBQ restaurant and bar called “Blue Smoke” – interestingly, there is another version of Blue Smoke in NYC which I’ve eaten at while seeing a Maria Schneider concert.  This venue was quite small and only a handful of dancers showed up, but we managed to have a great time nevertheless.

Wednesday night was a much bigger venue, set at a bar called Grappa’s Cellar, which had a great vibe and a lot more space.  They essentially cleared the main dining portion of the restaurant to make room for the dance, and there were tables set aside for stuff and for people to sit at.  We really worked up a sweat at this venue.

Since we wanted to meet the HK Swings people off the dance floor as well, we went afterwards to an ice bar near Grappa’s.  There we had a number of hijinks including meeting American soldiers who worked at the US Embassy, having drinks with them, nearly getting into a fight with them as they got drunker.  Also interesting was the bartender’s ability to make 7-layer shots and play a game where 4 random bottles from the bar are selected and then the bartender makes a drink from them.

We had a lot of fun, and made it home safely despite being rather off our heads!

22nd July
2011
written by admin
Herrang Sign

Herräng Sign

Each summer, the tiny town of Herräng becomes the swing dancing capital of the world. Hazel and I had both wanted to attend the camp for several years before but actually getting to Sweden for weeks on end in the summer was always too difficult. This year, we made sure to go by setting up our Europe itinerary such that we’d end up there at the right time! (more…)

21st July
2011
written by admin

After lounging around in the Copenhagen first class lounge it was finally time to go to Sweden. The train ride was uneventful, but we could notice a change already – there was no free chocolate on the Swedish trains! I suppose this was offset, though, by the free internet access provided to first class customers.

We arrived in Stockholm and tried to find our hostel, called Interhostel. A few things got in our way, though; first thing was that we weren’t able to find the street we needed when we left the station! It turned out that we got off at the wrong level of the station. This taught us our first lesson about Stockholm: the bridges are very important! Eventually we found our way to the side of the station and looked down on a cross street 100 feet below, which turned out to be the one we wanted. Anyway, we took this road for a while (in fact until it changed names) but the next turn was nowhere to be found! We were beginning to get a little weary at this point, but we pressed on along the new road and found our turn after two more blocks. We were relieved at this point because the hostel was less than a block away.

Interhostel was a pretty nice place. The beds were comfortable and spacious, the hostel was cheap, and our room was nearly empty the whole time we were there. Of course in Scandinavia the norm is to charge travelers for bed linens (we used our sleep sacks), which was a little unusual to us, but on the whole we approved.

Our Bunk At Interhostel

Our Bunk At Interhostel

(more…)

13th June
2011
written by Hazel

After a getting briefly lost on our way out of Barcelona (thanks everyone else for fixing that one!) we had a long but uneventful drive to Madrid and got rid of the car on our way into town.  Madrid has a really great metro system (the best one we’ve seen so far) and so it was much easier to get around that way than with the car in the city.

We were hungry after our long drive, so after getting our friends checked into their hotel we set out in search of something to eat.  We found a type of restaurant I hadn’t seen before.  It was a place where they had a bunch of sandwiches, pastas and salads all ready to buy and take home, but you could have them put it on a nice plate and eat it there if you wanted.  Genius!  After dinner, Justin and I headed over to the same hostel that we had stayed in on our first trip to Madrid and got settled in.

The next day was a sight-seeing marathon!  We saw parks, museums, buildings, the big bullfighting arena, and somehow still had enough energy to go out in the evening!

Really cool statue

Really cool statue

(more…)

7th June
2011
written by Justin

Hazel decided that for my birthday she would get me a nice night out in Spain – complete with Flamenco Dancing!  This has been something I’ve been really into since I saw a show in Ithaca back in 2005.  So I was stoked!  It turned out to be the perfect evening.  We started out the night at the restaurant “El Buey” – a favorite Hazel found on SpottedByLocals.com, a site that’s half TripAdvisor and half blog with entries by locals from the area.  We love this site!  Anyway, back to our date.  The specialty of the house is cook-it-yourself OX!  They bring 1kg of ox tenderloin sliced thinly (along with patatas fritas of course) and ceramic plates heated to a really high temperature.  Meat goes on plate, and voila!

El Buey

El Buey

(more…)

15th February
2011
written by Hazel

Well, we have about 30 mintues until we´re off on a 47 hour bus trip heading south to Ushuaia and there´s a lot we could still say about our time in Buenos Aires.  I´ve had an unfortunate couple of days with a yucky stomach bug and on top of that I managed to explode our plug adaptor.  Pretty big spark there.  Despite all of that we had an awesome Valentine´s Day picnic with some bread, cheese and bubbly and we´re very excited for the next step in our adventure.

Favorite Empanadas in Buenos Aires

Empanadas are everywhere in Buenos Aires and they are a delicious snack.  This place had our favorites so we´d often run off there on our break from Spanish class.  They have a ton of different kinds.  My favorite were the Caprese – little pastries full of cheese, basil and tomato, but the beef ones were yummy too.

We´re already missing our Spanish class.  We learned so much and had 2 really great teachers over the 3 weeks.  We learned a lot about Argentina and our communication skills definitely improved.  Both of us were tempted to stay longer in order to learn even more. 

Spanish Class with Alejandro

Last week we finally made it out to tango at La Viruta where we had a yummy dinner with a view of the dance floor then took a tango lesson.  Awesome!  There were so many amazing dancers there and we had a great time watching them.  We didn´t really get the typical tourist show, but we saw a lot of real tango.

View from our table - sorry it´s blurry

(more…)

8th February
2011
written by Hazel

We’re settling into a pretty awesome routine here in Buenos Aires.  Lots of sitting in cafes and studying, lots of good food, and lots of Spanish classes.  I’m very behind on emails, but will try to get caught up in the next few days.

We spent the past weekend exploring the city and had a really great time looking around.  Friday night was swing dance night and we were really pleased to discover that we could understand a LOT more of the Spanish than the week before.  On Saturday we went out to Palermo, the fancy area of town, on the Subte (Subway) and explored the giant complex of parks there.  We had thought to go to the Planetarium, but it was closed for renovation.  Instead we wandered around the rose garden and botanical garden and saw the outsides of the zoo and the racetrack.  These parks are truly enormous and really well kept up.  There were a lot of people lounging in the shade with picnics and it was a really pleasant place to hang out.

Click for Palermo Parks Gallery

On Sunday we had a busy day exploring the street market in San Telmo and going to the New Year celebration in Barrio Chine (Chinatown).  The street market was really colorful and fun to explore.  It was also a surprise to us that it was pretty low-key even though it was really large.  People were very laid-back and there wasn’t much persuasion to buy anything.  San Telmo is a cool old neighborhood, but I didn’t take too many pictures since it was pretty full of people.  In the afternoon we took a long subway ride and made it to Barrio Chine.  This was a bit of a disappointment since it was completely packed with people.  We could hardly even move, let alone look around.  We did get to see a dragon, but not a very good view.

Chinese New Year Celebration - Click for photo gallery

We’re dancing again tonight and starting to work on our plans for leaving the city.  I have to admit, it would be pretty easy to get sucked into spending quite a lot more time here.

31st January
2011
written by Justin

It turns out that there is in fact dancing in this town, even in enero (January) when it seems many of the dances shut their doors for the holidays. We found one on Friday that was at a cute little space near our apartment! Hazel had the great intuition to pick a place that is only 7 blocks or so from a couple of dance venues in the city, including the main swing one here:
View Larger Map

We had a lot of fun trying to understand things like “put your weight on the right foot” or “stop on 6” etc all in very fast Castillano. It was a trip! The dancing was really entertaining too — there were about 30-40 dancers there of all levels. We’ll be back next week!

27th January
2011
written by Hazel

Avenida 9 de Julio with the Obelisk in the background

It’s such an adventure learning our way around this city.  Last night we decided to go out dancing and even managed to figure out the subway to get there.  We were a little early, so we found a restaurant and had a really nice dinner.  Even though we’re starting to understand the menus a bit, there’s a lot of guesswork involved every time we eat.  Justin has a very brave strategy of picking something at random and seeing what shows up.  So far this has resulted in a really tasty beef sandwich and a nice chef salad.  I’m a little more careful and have mostly not been surprised.  Our dinner last night was $7 each for dinner, dessert and a glass of wine.  All of the food here is very expensive and very delicious.  We then went over to the dance, and were surprised to hear loud thumps instead of music.  Turns out the dance doesn’t start up again until February.  Oh well.  We’re anxious to get out dancing soon.

Avenida 9 de Julio

Time for Spanish class now.