The photograph has nothing to do with the post... I was a little unprepared when we went to the milonga on Friday, it was a snap decision, Heather and Dan, two other students on our course, had met up with us for a coffee at our local cafe (bear in mind this was 11pm, Liz and me had just finished eating and the cafe was still full, people of all ages out for dinner, a drink) and we found that Heather was planning to head to a milonga (a dancehall) later. We tagged along and an hour and a half later we rolled out of the taxi into the Armenian Cultural Centre and into La Viruta milonga. It was the basement... about the size of a couple of tennis courts, with tables all around the edge in two concentric rings (space to move between them without going on the dancefloor) and about 300 Porteños dancing samba.

Later on the tango got started and I'll be posting a lot more about tango later... basically though we could figure out that tango was invented something like this...

1870: Buenos Aires, a seedy warterfront dive. Juan and Marco, two older men, are chatting over a cafe solo.

Marco: It was a flash of inspiration. The whole dance came to me.
Juan: I've seen dances before... what makes this one so special?
Marco: Young pretty girls will line up to dance with older men.
Juan: I like it already. But my friend Carlos can't dance...
Marco: That's okay. The man leads and the standard thing to do is to lead a pretty chica on the dancefloor and get her to stop and (makes jiggling motion)...
Juan: Shake her thing?
Marco: That's what they'll call it in 100 years.
Juan: Nice.
Marco: Oh, and the men ask the ladies to dance by raising their eyebrows so...
Juan: So no-one can see us being rejected. Do you think the women will be pretty.
Marco: Stunners... and we can make like kung fu masters and have them fall over themselves to dance with us even when we get really old... wait... we can get them to wear really high heels so that their bums stick out... oh yeah, and we can make sure only certain types of clothing are de rigeur... oh yeah
Juan: What about the embrace? Can we get to touch some...
Marco: What are you? Some sort of pervert?

FADE  ¶ 9:38 PM