A blog about adventures in tango, travel and storytelling
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Just like many of the best things, I discovered Polish tango music by accident. It was shortly after I had been to a concert of Tango Diagonales, a quintet of young Argentinian musicians from La Plata. It was the first time that I had heard the flute played in a tango ensemble. Although the flute was one of the original instruments used to play tango you don’t hear it that...
There’s something about dancing outside. When I go to an indoor milonga, I often feel as if I am stepping into another world. Outdoors it’s there, beside everyday life, often surrounded by non-dancers who watch or are simply going about their daily life. In an open square, in a park, or as I experienced when I was in Nice, under an arcade and outside a museum. Maybe I think it’s...
It was the first evening of my holidays and it was raining. The venue was supposed to be a ten minute walk from where I was staying. So when I hadn’t arrived after twenty, I knew I must have gone wrong. There was a shop still open and I went in to ask for directions. Sure enough, I had been walking along the right street, but in completely the opposite...
Amsterdam has been high on my list of places to check out the tango scene for some time, as it’s just over 3 hours from Brussels. So when I was there for a weekend at the end of August to meet some friends, I decided to go the evening before and go dancing....
I bought my first pair of tango shoes in Buenos Aires, black and silver with the smallest heels they had at Flabella on Suipacha street. I danced my first tango in my new shoes on my last night at Maldita Milonga in the dimly lit Buenos Ayres Club on Peru street. Earlier that day, I had seen El Afronte playing at the San Telmo Market and when I bought their...
While many will argue that the tango was born in Buenos Aires, there is a quite a bit to suggest that its roots can also be traced back to the other side of the Rio de la Plata, in Montevideo. The world’s most famous tango, La Cumparsita, was composed by a Uruguayan. There is a week long festival in Montevideo every year to commemorate it and next year will be...
I am posting this MUCH later than expected but it is also the longest post I’ve written here so far. It is difficult to do justice in words and pictures to the many wonderful moments I experienced during ten intense days and nights of dancing tango in Berlin but I will try by sharing some of them with you below …...
It was getting dark as I left my hostel. A few metres from where the Beatles played their first gig abroad, a man dressed as a pirate was singing let it be and accompanying himself on a guitar. Friday night on the Reeperbahn was just getting started....
Apparently I was staying in a remote part of Hobart. The driver of the airport shuttle reluctantly agreed to drop me off, but said I’d have to get my return pick up from one of the hotels in the centre. We don’t normally come out this way. The tour guide who picked me up two days later said it was the first time in his career that he’d picked...
That blue sky is deceptive… One of the first things I did when I arrived in Sydney was to go shopping. For warm clothes. The changeable early Spring weather reminds me a bit of home and not in a good way. After a week in the Northern Territory I have to say that day time temperatures of 12 °C come as a bit of a shock. So it took...