taught salsa dancing

I taught salsa a couple of weeks ago. Here was the announcement:

"""Andrew will teach the basics of L.A.-style salsa. Also called line-style salsa because of how the dancers change position it has a different feel than Cuban-style salsa. Both styles are danced in Gothenburg.

The timing in salsa is a bit tricky because of the pauses on beats 4 and 8 so the lesson will start with the basic step and following the beat in the music. After that will be the underarm turn and the cross-body lead, along with advice on how the lead works and the reason why it's called "line-style" salsa.

"Cuban motion" adds an extra flare to salsa dancing by making the hips move. Andrew will introduce cuban motion through merengue, another latin dance with a simpler beat than salsa."""


It was 90 minutes of teaching Santa Fe style salsa to a mixture of new beginners and ballroom dancers. Went pretty well. (I use "Santa Fe" style to mean club style, line style, on-1 with a smooth (vs sharp) transition between moves.)

I was nervous at the first. That worked out once I started getting into the teaching. Not much different than other teaching I've done. I would have like to practice before though. When teach programming I have both a lot more experience and often notes about what I'm teaching.

I didn't have the right music. I don't have much salsa music (haven't the room to read from Darin's DVD's) and even the slowest song was too fast to teach. Luckily the club had slower music.

There were a few things I taught out of order. I should have started with an explanation of why it was line style. This was at an engineering school. That did help. I went with a more mechanical explanation of how things worked. Not often I get to say "C2 continuous" - though I know that's wrong. I meant it as a joke. (Really it's more like there's a maximum jerk -- which is the I-kid-you-not scientific term for change in acceleration.)

When I learned to dance several of my teachers talked about "energy" and "grounded" and other things which were hard to interpret. I'm a reductionist; breaking things down and build them back up again. So I tried to teach like that more mechanistic manner.

I mixed teaching styles. I tried to do a bit of the style one of the teachers in South Africa uses, but it's not for me. I mostly stayed with Santiago's style. Even with the circle of women around me. They didn't quite get it, but it was the first time for them.

I teach best as a tutor and not to large groups. What I did was teach and go round to each couple and give pointers. One of the guys was a relative beginner and wanted to do lots of fancy things without having the basics down. After the course, in the open dancing, he wanted me to show him a .. I think it was a CBL inside turn, but that's too simple. Ahh, perhaps I was showing him why he couldn't do a given lead because it was too easily confused with another move, so he wanted to do both.

There are many paths to dance. I personally emphasize the small details first. I think going for the moves makes for bad habits that are hard to break later. It's more than that, I know, and different. Too complicated to explain now.

Hardest was teaching cuban motion. That was the last 10 minutes of the course. I did it with meringue music. Being traditional and all. The thing is, I don't know quite know how to teach it. I remember taking Liz's class focusing on Cuban motion (I do like details) but it was too long ago to remember the details, and I couldn't recall enough from your and Santiago's lessons to teach it.

I also knew it would take a while no matter what so I wasn't worried. I had a lot of lessons focusing on that so instead I only wanted to get across "stepping into a bent leg, which gets straightened" and "shoulders stay still." I prefer dancing with people whose shoulders are not moving up and down.

The ballroom dancers, of course, knew ballroom style Cuban motion. They tried, but habits are habits. Just like I can't do ballroom style motion.

I taught an underarm turn as an arm raise/halo around the head, and emphasized that the lead can start early.
One of the ballroom dancers was having a problem with it because his habit is to do a tick-tock on the lead so he needs to start it later. There too I got to talk about mechanics.

Overall it went well. I got a gift card for two to go to the movies. Anyone want to join me? :)

In the free dancing I tried some waltzing. The first was pretty bad as I tried to remember lessons from earlier this year. It did help having a larger floor than the practice room in Santa Fe. The second try was much better. Still only doing basics and I don't think I attempted the full progression, but enough to fake it.

The woman I danced with is from the local ballroom dance society. She wants me to take lessons from some-teacher-or-other when I'm next here. I'm still of mixed views on ballroom dance (called "standard dance" in Swedish; sorry, "standard dans" in Swedish). It's that poofy formalism. I watched some competitive ballroom dance on the sport channel here. They cover weird sports here. Tall thin guys wearing shirts with the fronts open to the belly button. Not my style.

Plus, there really isn't much chance to dance ballroom socially. OTOH, I do want to reacquire those long missing skills cause you never know when you'll need to dance a Viennese Waltz. More importantly, I want there to be a time in my future when knowing how to a waltz becomes useful.

Though so far that hasn't been the case with my rusting fencing skills. *sigh* Maybe I should practice dancing while wearing a cutlass? Just in case pirates attack during the big ball?

Read a funny joke in Swedish which translates well to English: "Dad? How do you spell 'locomotive'?" "Just like it sounds." "Choo-choo?" See the Language Log entry for the original and details.

den här gången ... på levande svenska!

Åh, det är så roligt att förstör svenska. Jag pratar och skriver "Rinkeby" svenska, eller svengelska. Jag använder syftningar som kommer direkt fran USA. T.ex, rubriken kommer (för mig) fran "Spiderman", en TV-serie som jag tittade omkring 1980. Programmet börjarde med "in living color" däreför att när det ritades (kanske i 1960-talet), då var det nytt och spännande att ha färger.

(Ah, it's so much fun to destroy Swedish [play on words; "förstår svenska" means "to understand Swedish"]. I speak and write "Rinkeby" Swedish [Rinkeby is a part of Stockholm with a high immigrant population who mix Swedish grammar and pronounciation with their original language. I am exaggerating and even wrong as Rinkeby Swedish includes many loan words from eastern Europe and the Middle East and I've been working hard to use proper "verb second" word order .. except in dependent clauses where sentence adverbials come before the verb.] or "svengelska" ["Swenglish", the other way]. I use allusions which come direct from the US. For example, the title [this blog entry is titled "this time .. in living Swedish"] comes (for me) from "Spiderman", a TV cartoon I used to watch around 1980. The show began with "in living color" because when it was drawn (probably in the '60s) it was new and exciting to have color.)

Kursen är slut. Det är bra eftersom minnet har blivit fullt med nya ord och uttryck. Jag behöver tid för att smälta allt och använda dem i samtal. Istället för kursen jobbade jag på AZ i måndags och tisdags. Jag skulle ha jobbat hela veckan men jag har varit en lite sjuk och deprimerad under den sista ungefär 10-12 dagar. Det finns många möjliga anledningar. Det har varit svårt att knuffa mig själv att lära mig så mycket, jag bor i ett nytt land under julen men utan mina traditioner, vintermörket, mamas dyra operation (jag hjälpade med kostnad eftersom de har inte råd), jag gjörde sonder glasögon (dyra men inte än dyrt). Lyckliga tider.

(The course has finished. That's good because my memory has become full of new words and expressions. I need time to digest everything and use them in sentences. Instead of the course I worked at AZ on Monday and Tuesday. I should have worked the whole week but I've been a bit sick and depressed for the last roughly 10-12 days. There's many possible reasons. It's been hard to push myself to learn so much, I'm living in a new country during Christmas but without my traditions, the darkness of winter, Mom's operation (I helped with the cost since they can't afford it), I broke my glasses (expensive but not as expensive). Happy times.)

Inte allt var dåligt. Jag hade flera träffer med en tjej. En var på en Lucia- och julkoncert på domkyrken. Hennes syster sjöng i köret. De sjöng bl.a "Silent Night, Holy Night", som påminde mig om mänga förre jular. T.ex, när Sara, Jessica och jag gick upp och ner Canyon Road på luminariapromenaden julafton kväll för två år sedan. I alla fall, tjejen (som ska vara anonym här) och jag pratade mycket. Det var jättefint att samtala med annan som är intelligent och snygg och en nörd men vi bestämde oss att vi inte tillräckligt matchar. Ännu var de mina första svenska träffer. Bl.a lärde jag mer om skillnader mellan vanor i Sverige och USA.

(Not everything was bad. I had a few days with a woman. [The word "tjej" doesn't translate directly to English. It's the female equivalent of "guy" or "dude".] One was to a Lucia/Christmas concert at the catherdral. Her sister sang in the choir. They sang (amoung other things) "Silent Night, Holy Night", which reminded me of many previous Christmases. For example, the time a couple of years ago when Sara, Jessica and I went up and down Canyon Road (in Santa Fe) doing the luminary walk on Christmas Eve. In any case, the woman (who shall be anonymous here) and I talked. It was very nice to converse with someone who is intelligen and pretty and a nerd, but we decided that we don't match well enough. Still, they were my first Swedish dates. Amoung other things I learned more about the differences between customs in Sweden and the US.)

beachhead

I have established a beachhead on the Swedish language coastline. Starting approximately 10 days ago (24 November) I was able to have conversations about more than the topics revolving around dance and my background. Not hard conversations, and very slowly. But conversations. It's funny though in that I still hear things in English. My grasp is more at the code book level, as I translate the words and assemble the result. A few times I can construct sentences using Swedish grammar instead of English but my speaking rate drops even further.

According to Jacob my grammar isn't all that bad. I'm mostly getting the word order correct, and mostly getting my declensions to agree, and mostly getting the right pronounciation. Jag börjar förstå svenska istället för att förstöra det.

My current nemesis is partikel verb. Verbs followed by particles. English has the same thing, and I never realized it. For a simple example "I blew the horn" vs. "I blew up the horn" mean rather different things. Even better, "I blew up the pipe" could mean that I exhaled into an pipe going upwards, or making it explode. There's a slightly different pronouncation in those two.

Swedish has the same thing. "att hälsa" means "to greet" while "att hälsa på" means "to visit (somebody)". Depending on the stress "Jag hälsade på dig" means "I greeted you" or "I visited you". But then again like English there are words with different meanings, each with different prepositions and which are not particle verbs. (Particle verb have the stress on the particle.) For example, "att höra" means "to belong" and "to hear". "Det hör till ..." always means "It belongs to" because "till" is not used with hearing. Like in English, "I hear to" does not make sense.

While in Swedish you can "hear after" ("höra efter") something, meaning to inquire about something.

It takes 10 years to master a new topic. I've got more than 9 years to go. :)

Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving not being a Swedish tradition, there was no holiday here. After class I was looking for a place to eat for lunch. I went to an Indian restaurant but it was crowded so I walked down Linnégatan and spied a Subway. Imagine that. I had seen plenty of McDs but had forgotten about the Subway. I went in. It smelled like a Subway. I decided to get a sub for lunch and was looking at the sandwiches when an item jumped out at me. Kalkon. Turkey. Not really that common in Sweden, it being an American bird and all.

Yes, I had a turkey sandwich for Thanksgiving. I went whole hog and got the 12"er too. To top it off, "southwest" sauce. Double-whammy!

Okay, it's not even a shadow of what I would have rather had - dinner with Rachel and Criag's - but it's what I could manage.

Swedish kicking my butt

Well Swedish has been kicking my butt these last couple of weeks. I started a Swedish course at the Folkuniversity Monday a week ago. It's level "B", which I think corresponds to after a semester of studies. It's been hard for my to judge where I am in the class. Partially because of the diversity of the students. There are 3-4 that speak Swedish quite well. These are people who, for example, have a Swedish husband or work in a Swedish company. Then there are some who are worse than I am. Most of these seem to have dropped out, putting me towards the bottom of the class.

I'm not used to being one of the worst. So I've been plugging away at my studies, mostly looking up words and grammar. (BTW, in Swedish you can say "att studera" and "att plugga", with latter meaning more like "to cram" (or "to swot" in British English). A "plugghäst" is a "study horse", and you can be a pluggis.) As such I can read Swedish passably. I'm going through Pippi Longstocking with an accompanying CD. The text of the two are identical, which helps because I'm quite poor at hearing spoken Swedish. I'm glad to say that in the 2nd 4 minutes (about 3 pages) I was able to follow along the gist of the text while reading it at the same time that Astrid Lindgren was speaking it.

Note "gist". There are still many words I don't know, and some that I won't be able to memorize this time through. For example, "tröskeln till" means "at the threshold of". Just how many times am I going to use that one? While other words are just so cool that I can find a way to use it, like "lantis" meaning "hick". "Jag kommer från en stad med bara 70.000 invånare därföre när jag besöker Göteborg känner jag som en lantis."

I was extremely frustrated the first week of class because of not following spoken Swedish well enough. It's hard to follow what the teacher and the others are saying, and of course there are many words I don't know. On top of that, a decent chunk of my Swedish seemed to have disappeared while I was out of the country. Imagine that.

My biggest problems in class are when I try to speak, especially when structured around a topic. The absolute worst is the Thursday classes when we read and article in the newspaper and summarize the results. I completely, totally and royally suck at it. I can understand the article, with a dictionary (the same holds for everyone else - and I'm starting to get to the point where I can use a pure Swedish dictionary instead of a Swedish/English dictionary) but summarizing proves to be quite hard.

I've been trying to thinking of an analogy. It's like there's a map, and the ideas are at different points in the map. Because I read the article I can follow it's paths through idea space, but to summarize I need to find different routes which still capture the same ideas as the original article. When I do this in English I don't need a map. I can set off through the woods and know I'll get there. In Swedish I survey the landscape first, check my declensions all the time, try different pathways, worry about my pronounciation, and forget where I am. I'm much better at written Swedish than spoken.

Maybe there's also something about my programming experience which affects how well I do with spoken vs. written Swedish? I've gotten decently good at following seemingly arbitrary rules and memorizing words. In that casting of things, what I need is a compiler with a good warning system, to get better feedback.

Men jag är envis och bestämd och ska lära mig det här språket.

Stone cookies

I learned a Swedish word today; "stenkakor". Translated directly, "sten" is "stone" and "kakor" is "cookies". One of the guys at tango brought in an old hand-cranked record player. I think you say grammaphone for something that old. It played something I thought was thick vinyl. I practiced Swedish with Johann, using the word "skivor" meaning "slices" or "disks". I know that by walking past record/CD stores. I think it may include CDs. Anyway, he mentioned that it actuallly played stenkakor. I had no idea of what that was and he didn't know the English word. He brought one over to me.
It was thick and heavy. Like a stone cookie.

The best guess for the name in English was a 78, but I thought 78s were only a style of old record. Came back to the House of a Thousand Wows and looked it up in the dictionary. It said "old 78 records." The "old" was perfectly apt. Of course there was a transition from old-style to vinyl and for backwards compatibility the new ones worked with the old players.

Here is a Google image search if you want to see what they looked like: http://images.google.com/images?q=stenkakor

Wikipedia (as usual) has background information. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gramophone_record . The disk was made of shellac and other materials (cotton fiber, carbon black, and corporate secrets) - no stone that I can tell. I has the following quote: "During and after World War II when shellac supplies were extremely limited, some 78 rpm records were pressed in vinyl instead of shellac (wax), .." The record I looked at most closely was from 1946. I wonder if it was vinyl instead of shellac.

rest of the UK trip

Writing these takes time. For these last couple of entries I've been curious about things I've seen so did research which didn't always make it into my writeups. I figure you can follow hyperlinks and do web searches as well as I can.

I stayed at B's place in Oxford for the weekend, to Cambridge for the week, then back to Oxford for the next weekend. On the 2 Friday evenings I went with Carole, one of B's roommates, to tango practice. It's held at the Quaker center. The first Friday had about 40 people, the 2nd about 25. As a rough estimate from memory. I didn't count. They dance in open embrace. On that Sunday I went with B and Carole to tango class and we chatted with the teacher after class who said, "this *is* England" when asked about the different styles. In the US some of the first lessons, for those who teach the close embrace, is to get used to being that close. It is hard, and can make for giggles while struggling with the cultural expectations of personal space with strangers.

The music was almost all traditional. Only the last few songs were alternative tango. On the second Friday I don't agree with the DJ's music choice. One of the alt. tangos had little in the way of a followable beat and another was a cover of The Beatles' "Yesterday". It didn't work.

The first Saturday night was a salsa party. I realized I hadn't danced salsa for some weeks, what with all the traveling. I had chosen tango over salsa. The event was after a salsa class and the teachers had recently decided to switch from teaching on-1 to teaching on-2. I know I should learn to do on-2, but I can't. I can start okay but when I get off the basic I switch back to on-1 timing. In Sweden and (I think) the UK they teach cha-cha (which they call cha-cha-cha) on-2. That comes from the ballroom tradition. In Santa Fe people dance cha-cha on-1, because they almost all come to cha-cha through salsa and club dancing. I had one lesson from an on-2 cha-cha dancer.

Before that night I had met perhaps 4 people who could dance on-2 and not dance on-1. I did try. The best was when I asked a very new dancer. We both equally struggled with the dance. I asked a woman, a relative beginner, to dance and mentioned I would dance on-1. She was relieved because she had been gone for a while and came back only to find the dance had changed from underneath her.

I still find something lacking when I dance salsa in the UK. That sense of playful flirting I've mentioned before. There were a couple people I enjoyed dancing with. (In addition to dancing with B, Carole and Sarah - I'm talking about strangers.) Luckily for me I asked the one I liked the best towards the end, and we finished up the night. That makes for a nice finale.

Before going out dancing B and Carole hosted a small dinner party for their salsa friends. One was Alladin, who came out from London. I pointed out how clear the sky was, as we came back from the dance. He had never seen the clear night sky nor the constellations. Not surprising for someone living in London. The Dark Skies people will need to do a lot of convincing to make it possible to see the Milky Way once again from London's center.

Carole served (among other things) stuffed peppers and baked veggies. Must remember to make sweet potatoes more often. Sliced, brushed with olive oil, bake 20 minutes. Yum!

A dance instruction observation. At least in Oxford the teachers want the students to advance together. You start with the beginning class and stay with it until everyone advances to the next class. No drop-ins.

During the week in Cambridge I worked. No dancing. Nothing much interesting to say here. I did stay in a 900 year old hotel. I don't know which part was 900 years old, though the TV did not have remote control. The guy behind the bar (pub master? host? Some UK term I don't know) sounded like he was from eastern Europe. I'm told there's been a lot of Poles who've moved to UK in the last couple years after they became part of the EU. That explains why I read that Poles were one of the largest emigrant groups to Sweden last year.

Back in Oxford for the 2nd weekend I took a walk with Carole to see more of the city. In this one we went through the parks and I got to see the bench dedicated to Tolkien, with two trees nearby planted in memory of the Ents. That was cool.

At Stanstead airport, waiting for the plane to take us to Sweden, a woman comes up to me. I met her tango dancing. We chatted for a bit, and more after getting off in Sweden. I've been struggling to remember her name. Even normal Swedish names I have problems with. They are just different enough that they don't stick. Then again, I'm only average about remembering names in the first place. It's practice-able, I know.

That brings me back, finally, to Gothenburg. I'll be here for a while. I had thoughts about going to Craig and Rachel's (and David's) for Thanksgiving but at $700 that's a bit steeper than I want to pay, and I don't want to deal with the hassle that is TSA security theater. For Christmas I think I'll go to Leipzig and visit the Visagies. Could even take the night train again. (It's about 14 hours by train from there to here.) My next trip to the US will be in February, which is when my legal ability to stay in Sweden expires. Though I could go elsewhere (South Africa? UK? Ireland? NZ? Oz?) there are a couple of conferences in the US I plan to attend and people to visit.

Outside it's raining, and dark comes early now that we've stopped saving it.