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cuba salsa

"Too Much Salsa and You Could Die"

That’s what Cuban salsa dance teacher Osbanis Tejedo said at breakfast on Sunday morning to the DJ. He was asking him to stir up the music a bit, some bachata, some merengue, some reggaeton.

Well, despite those words, I remember last night being mostly salsa…and the night before and the night before. I think I may in fact be dying from too much salsa. I feel as though I’ve been out on a drinking bender, absolutely shattered. And in the past three days I’ve had no more than one glass of wine.

It must be dehydration. Let me weigh myself…nope, no change there.

Salsa is definitely like a drug. It makes you feel amazing, you forget all your troubles while it lasts. Then you come back down to earth and realise that your problems haven’t gone away, for goodness sakes. They’re right there waiting to be dealt with, how dare they! And what do you turn to for a solution…?

More salsa.

It was great to be with a hundred or so like-minded addicts. How we sweated to get our rumba moves right, to move like the African spirits, the Orishas, how we strove to follow the tiny-but-fiery Damarys in her energetic and outrageously sexy reggaeton routine, how we concentrated on Kerry Ribchester’s wonderful body-movement techniques to move ribcages for Cuban son, and laughed at Leo and Osbanis’s flirty rueda moves.

Last night, you saw it all pouring out on the dance floor. Salsa with rumba, orishas, reggaeton, son, all mixed up. Okay, most people there were Northern European (and I was raised here, so I too started off stiff-as-a-board), but we were beginning to get there.

But man, am I exhausted.

Now, when’s the next salsa thing…?

Categories
cuba salsa

Fiesta de Los Rumberos


Fiesta de Los Rumberos
Originally uploaded by mgharris

Rafael del Busto (in the cap) takes everyone through some moves in a warm-up Rueda de casino.

I felt sorry for non-salsa guests at the Arora hotel, Crawley. The music from the party went on until 2am at least and was easily audible in our room on the 2nd floor – enough to sing along with the lyrics.

MG – why were you trying to sleep when there was Cuban salsa? Well for one thing, 3 consecutive very late nights is beyond me. We wanted to be fresh for a long day of workshops beginning with Ariel teaching Cuban son.

Tonight though, we’ll stay until the end. Some friends are kindly taking care of our little daughter so it’s that VERY rare event for parents- a night off!

Just as well. I bet the hotel will get complaints from other guests. But tonight…I want that salsa played LOUD.

Emailed from my BlackBerry®

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Joshua Files mexico

Chichen Itza at the Equinox

A couple of posts ago, I mentioned the spectacle of the equinox at the Mayan site of Chichen Itza (one of the New 7 Wonders of the Ancient World).

I had a look on Youtube and indeed there are some videos of the event. Nice, saves us all having to join the madding crowds.

Here’s my pick of the crop:
Paco, a Mayan guide at Chichen Itza, explains the whole thing to a TV reporter.

Atmospheric little Chichen-equinox movie, with Pink Floyd music.

Categories
cuba

Buena Vista Night – July

What a pity I’m going to miss the next Buena Vista Night in Oxford. It’s quite become the highlight of the month, although with all the festivities in London lately at Carnival de Cuba and next week’s Afro-Cuban Weekender, Habanaloko party the following week and the Manolito Concert at the Coronet at the end of the month, July looks like the best month this year for us UK-bound Cuba-loving salseros.

D and I arrived to watch Habanero Leo Henriquez from Brighton teaching the raunchiest rueda moves I’ve ever seen. Mangos, castiga-la (“she’s been naughty – slap her, you know you want to…”). I was kind of glad I wasn’t in the class. Hey – there are some salsa moves that I’ll only do with David.

(Well…maybe…until some Cuban guy comes along and tempts me into it…)

Over at the bar we had one of those brilliant reunions you sometimes get if you’ve been dancing for years and years – someone who’s dropped off the planet for a while will swoop back into Oxford and of course, they’ll visit the latest salsa joint. On Saturday it was Nick St Clair. Nick; blond Nick with the flowing blond mane and the tight white jeans, sexy Nick with the flashy Merc, Nick who once had his own salsa band. Yes, that Nick? You don’t know him? Ahhh. Before your time then?

I didn’t recognise Nick at first because he’s gone all Andaluz. Living in Granada, Spain will do that for you. His hair is darker, tied back in a gitano-style pony tail. He was dressed all in black. Nick has two kids now; gorgeous, he showed us pictures. I had a brilliant dance with Nick – he hasn’t lost his touch at all. My favourite Nick story is about an early dance experience of his. A sultry Spanish woman was dancing with him in a club, when he’d had just one or two lessons. She mistook his flamboyant clothes and hair for the att-it-tude of a guy who can dance. (Beginner need to watch out for that!) When she found out that he was a beginner she just left him there, walked away from him on the dance floor. Lo deje planta’o!

As Nick told me this story, it began to sound familiar. “I think I know that woman,” I told him. “In fact, I think she’s a good friend of mine – Ana.” So devastated was Nick by this treatment that he resolved to become a terrific dancer. And he did. So Ana did him a favour really, didn’t she?

We really enjoyed the set by DJ Shorty. She’s a very pretty girl. And she loves the music of Adalberto Alvarez!

So…next week…Crawley! For three nights and two days of all-salsa-all-the-time!

Categories
Joshua Files mexico nostalgia writing

Mayan site of Chichen Itza One of the New 7 Wonders!


Chichen Itza
Originally uploaded by
Aleksu

The results are in – it was the final days of lobbying wot done it!

The Mayan city of Chichen Itza has been named as one of the official ‘New’ 7 Wonders of the World.

The photo is one of Aleksu’s – a contact of mine from Flickr who takes gorgeous photos. He’s been urging people to hit the 7 Wonders Website voting for Chichen.

Chichen Itza was the first Mayan ruin I ever visited, aged 15, on a hugely memorable trip to Yucatan with my father, stepmother and three sisters. We were driven there on the slow dusty road from Cancun. Not by my father – who stayed in Cancun to play golf – but his chauffeur. This was before cars routinely had aircon. It was a sweltering August day – at least 45 degrees Celsius and close to 100% humidity. and the site was crowded – even in 1981 it was Mexico’s most popular archaeological site after Teotihuacan. My sister Pili passed out from heat stroke in the ladies’ bathroom.

We walked around the site in stunned, exhausted silence. I was nursing my usual sunburn and was in agony most of the time. (Sunblock didn’t work in those days; I always forgot to wear a T-shirt for a critical hour or so, for which I always paid in tears of pain). I tried climbing the main staircase of tht Temple of Kukulcan aka El Castillo (pictured above) and got about twenty stairs up before I turned around and had an attack of vertigo. I knew without a shadow of doubt that if I climbed to the top with my sisters I would have to be helicoptered down. I managed to climb back down those 20 stairs but my legs were shaking all the way down, even though I used the trick of descending on a diagonal.

I went into the tunnel in El Castillo to try to climb the Temple of the Jaguar that sits under the newer, flashier Toltec-influenced pyramid. There was a crowd of tired, hot, breathless tourists waiting patiently to ascend a tight staircase just wide enough to permit a line of people going up and a line of people going down. It was like a steam oven in there; everyone was being slowly poached. The skin on my shoulders felt like it was on fire. I took one look up that staircase and felt like I’d got as close to hell as I ever wanted to be. A wave of claustrophobia gripped me; I almost shoved people out of my way on the way out.

Chichen isn’t my personal favourite of the Mayan sites. I prefer something more Classic Mayan, with the Puuc or Rio Bec architecture, ideally in a more jungle-setting, like Palenque. However Chichen has two sites, including an older, Classic Mayan site which is Puuc style.

Chichen’s buildings are spectacularly preserved – by now all four faces of El Castillo are restored, when I first visited it was just two. This pyramid is precisely aligned to capture the sun on the sides so that it lights up triangles on the main staircase and the serpents head at the base. This happens only on the Spring and Winter equinoxes and it has the effect of creating an undulating serpent-of-light on the staircase. I’ve never visited then because the crowds at that time of year are insane. (There must be a Youtube video of it…I’ll check).

Despite the constant pain of my sunburn I was impressed beyond anything I’d ever experienced. I’d never visited any Mexican pyramids before, for some reason I’d never been taken to Teotihuacan (near Mexico City). I’d had a fascination with the Maya since aged 11 my father took us to stay at the Acapulco Princess, fashionable in the late 1970s/early 80s, and – I was told – built in the style of a modern Mayan pyramid (although the website says Aztec but still…) But to see the real thing, to experience something of that atmosphere, to imagine the citadel filled with warriors and priests, ball-players and sacrificial victims…was quite, quite amazing.

We returned late that evening to the hotel in Cancun. I went into the hotel bookshop and bought the shortest book I could find about the Maya. It turned out to be one of those Erich-Von-Daniken type books about ancient astronauts and their supposed influence on early civilisation. I lapped it up. I hardly slept that night.

If any of you read ‘Invisible City’ next February you will see just how far that day left its indelible mark on me.