Back to salsa!

Wow. I wasn't feeling too well, but then I considered how easy it is to come up with excuses and not do things, so I had a shower, dressed up and went out. It wasn't hard to find the place; I took the tram, walked about kilometer and there I was. (Google maps comes handy in situations like this, when you don't know where exactly you are going.)

The place itself looked very cosy. Gezellig, to use a nice Dutch word. There is a large restaurant area right at the entrance and as you walk further, the tables are replaced by the dancefloor. So, you can, if you want, dance right there. Or you can walk a bit further inside and there'll be a separate area for salsa. The walls are covered with mirrors, which is useful if you want to improve your technique - as long as there are not too many people. I think it's mainly for the dance classes that are held there during the day. There is not too much space, but the music is good, and there are both Cuban and L.A. dancers, which gives you a nice option to choose between the styles. There was one guy I find particularly fun to dance with. I asked him whether he was also dancing Cuban because he combined the two styles, and he said that he didn't know what he was dancing because what he knows he learnt on the dancefloor and not in a dance school.

I felt a bit conscious about my deteriorating L.A. style dancing, especially because one guy would have killed me with a glance if he could when I missed something... Then we switched to Cuban and the problem was solved.

Salsa was good but that wasn't the only reason I went to the C. I heard that they also have an area for zouk and it was an absolute must for me to check out. Throughout the 2 years I've been dancing salsa, I danced zouk with five guys, thus I'm far from being a pro. In fact, I know about four steps and that's it. But it has been love at first sight. I knew I wanted to dance zouk the moment I saw people dancing in the Winkel van Sinkel.

And I was there: at the first zouk party of my life! The fact that it was such a natural thing for everybody else made it very surreal for me. I didn't know what to expect but I definitely did not expect the crowd I found. Imagine a busy night in the Szilvuplé and that's the atmosphere you should have in mind (but much better air-conditioning). A full dancefloor and people standing and sitting by the walls, some just watching the dancers, some waiting to be asked to dance. I was definitely one of the observers. I danced salsa and when I got tired I moved to the other room to check out the zouk people. (Then I went back to dance and then back to watch zouk, etc.) It actually seemed to me that there was little mixing of the salsa and the zouk populations: you either come here to dance salsa or to dance zouk.

At one point the DJ put on some samba music - that's the point when only few people stayed on the dancefloor - and people started to dance a dance that looked very jumpy and energetic and cool in a way, but had little to do with competitive samba. So, as I got home I did my research and found out that they were dancing samba de gafiera. Yet another thing on my to do list for the coming period. 1. Learn to dance zouk. 2. Learn to dance sambe de gafiera.

Even though I didn't get to dance zouk at all, I'm very happy I convinced myself to go. This danceless lifestyle (except for yesterday when I went out with my new class mates and had dinner and danced for four hours straight) was killing me. You feel the vibe, you move, you laugh - dance is one of the best human social inventions ever! My foot was okay, but not the best, so when it started aching, I decided to leave. 2 hours of dancing was a good start after missing a whole month. There has been significant improvement in my foot's condition and the fact that I was able to dance was such a relief!

Uni

I guess it's more or less time for an update on what I'm doing and my laundry is in the washing machine, so I have some time for a short post till the laundry is done. Let's start with uni.

I only have classes twice per week and sometimes I wish I had more. Not because they are so amazing but because I find it really hard to motivate myself to read all the articles and chapters that I'm supposed to read. At UC I solved this problem by not reading the readings and reading everything the day before the exam, but, in the back of my mind, I know that the same strategy wouldn't work now. So, I read a bit and then I stop. I read a part of a chapter and then get bored with it and start another one. I cook, clean up, wash the dishes so that I would have an excuse to do something else. Then, if I manage to convince myself to get back to the book, I finish the chapter and feel proud of myself. I reward myself with an episode of House, M.D. but since I'm already halfway through season 5, that's not going to last for long...

Classes are okay. There are a couple of people that have some good points, but class is not too discussion centered, so it's actually only listening to the guy who tells exactly the same things that I can read in the book. Sometimes I don't get why I should be in class if this is the only thing I hear. I'm already annoyed by people who feel the need to critique a given theory in class. Yes, babe, it's a theory, this is a theoretical overview, this is what X.Y. thought in 1967, and certainly, other authors also thought it was bullshit, which is going to be the next point of the teacher and which can also be read in the book.

Anyway, luckily, there are some cool people in my class. I've already had two dinners and a housewarming party with some of them and we're going out dancing tonight.

Not salsa. Yet. I hate that my foot isn't in perfect shape yet. It's getting there... slowly. But I might just try to ignore the pain and see what the city has to offer for a Sunday evening tomorrow. I'm fed up with spending the evenings at home.

P.S. RecogMe, I've been trying to reach you, would you please open your mailbox or sign in to MSN/Skype sometimes? Thanks!

In memoriam Patrick Swayze

We were thirteen and Irma and I were watching Dirty Dancing at her parents' place, drooling over Patrick Swayze's back (recall the scene where he's teaching Baby to dance? he had the most gorgeous back)... In fact, we've done that more than once. I've seen that movie at least a dozen times since then. It's clishé, cheesy, too American, but just great. Some of its lines, e.g. "I carried a watermelon", "nobody puts Baby in the corner" and "this is your dance space; this is my dance space; I don't want yours and you don't want mine" are common knowledge if you have anything to do with dancing.

So, after a long illness, Patrick Swayze is gone. He was the first actor I liked, well, second after Gene Kelley, but Gene Kelley was born in 1912, and so his death wasn't so upsetting. (He was also a dancer, of course, and a very handsome one, actually.)

I spent the whole evening watching Dirty Dancing scenes...

I couldn't embed it but you can watch Patrick Swayze and Jennifer Grey in the "I carried a watermelon" scene here. (If you're watching it, it's worth to watch till the end of the clip :))

And the final dance:

1 year

Who would have thought... :)

The market

I used to dislike markets when I was a child. My grandfather would walk across the whole place, checking the prices before he would by anything. Then we would walk across the market once again to buy what we needed. I thought of the first round as completely useless. I always wished we had gone to the playground instead.

But I learnt to appreciate markets, starting with the one in Utrecht. You could smell fresh stroopwafels from a distance, there were stands of sweets on the side, and people selling fish and cheese were on the inside rows. It was a colorful mix of what you would expect in a Chinese clothes market in Hungary, a regular food market and the Dutch stuff: the cheese, the olives, the fish, the stroopwafels, the bikelocks, the Indonesian food. An exciting blend of odors, noises and moods.

Then I left for home and I decided I was going to get my groceries from the market. I didn't pick the closest one, I just picked the prettiest one. The Vámház krt. wasn't exactly on the next corner and still under the influence of my years in Utrecht, I decided I was going to bike there. And I did. Every time I had to go to the market, I got on my bike, fought my way there in the traffic, locked my bike in front of the entrance and hoped I would find it there on my return. I plunged into the market the way my grandfather did, checked the prices and the quality - although I wouldn't cover the whole market at all - and then decided where to by what. The lack of a language barrier made things easier and funner, and the butchers were hitting on me all the time. They always offered to cook the meat that I bought if I had dinner with them. They were funny :)

Sellers always use the same tactics there - and all Hungarian markets, I think - and I always fall for it. If you ask for 1 kg of something you can bet your life on getting more. They put the vegetables on the scale and say "it's 1,2 kg, is that okay?". And who would say it is not okay? This summer I went to the market on the Bosnyák tér and saw some gorgeous raspberries. There was only a 10-year-old boy behind the stand and asked what he could get me. I told him I wanted 250 g raspberries. He measured it and said "it's 300 g, is that okay"? I said sure with a huge smile on my face. He was only about ten and he already knew what to do. Well, you can obviously only do this with smaller things and larger quantities. This is where one of my favorite jokes come from (credits to Irma):

- I'd like an apple. (Egy almát kérek.)

- It's two, is that okay? (Kettő lett, maradhat?)

I don't think the translation gives justice to the joke, but I can assure you that it's funny in Hungarian. I once told it to someone on the market while he was serving me and he cracked up.

So, why the market topic? Because I had an assignment on the market. The idea was to observe a market, find out what makes it an organization, see what spatial properties it has, see who communicates with who etc., which is a really cool assignment to get as an exercise in fieldwork. First thing in the morning I got my bike and headed for the market. Since I wanted to do some shopping too, I decided I would do that after my observations and not carry all my bags around.

It's interesting how much you observe once you stop paying attention to the food you want to buy. But it's even better to engage in conversations with the sellers. So, I learnt that they start working at 5 and finish at 4. There are people who go around with warm coffee and the sellers who buy it only have to pay for it at the end of the day. Coffee actually seems to be a pretty important break in their day; I've seen a lot of people talking their neighbors at the next stand while drinking coffee. There was a guy selling pastries who was relatively new. They still move him around on the market if there is space until he gets his own final spot. I met a guy who was very enthusiastic because it was his third day, a woman selling books who also has an online store, and a man selling fruits who also has a store in the city. In the end, I talked to quite a couple of people.

It's not hard to imagine how hungry I became as soon as I arrived. I was surrounded by food and smells and I knew it immediately that it was a lost battle. I couldn't properly pay attention till I got something to eat and I talked to two policemen while eating, just to feel I was doing something useful. Once I walked across the whole market, I declared my mission complete and bought the stuff I needed (also from a store close by): cheese, tomatoes, two pineapples, body lotion, a serving spoon, cucumber, 2 files for my classes and a comb among other things. My collection of things I need is almost complete by now.