My entire trip so far has been awesome, but apart from the obvious I did not experience the very big cultural differences I expected to see and it took me a salsa party to discover how different the ‘romantic’ culture differs from my own. What I’m about to write is a funny and slightly embarrassing story about what happened at Maestra Vida, a Chilean salsa club.
Arriving at Maestra Vida I soon found out that I was the only gringo at the party. This quite surprised me as the venue was located in the most touristic part of town and known to be the best salsa venue of Santiago, however small the place might be. It initially was a bit hard as, contrary to Dutch salsa parties, everyone is sitting with their friends at a table and mostly limit their dancing within their social circle. Me being alone and gringo therefore turned some faces as it’s highly uncommon to come alone and at first I had some trouble asking girls to dance as they did not know me. Eventually I did find some people to dance with and soon more people followed as they saw I was a reasonable dancer (the girls here dance a different style of salsa so it limited my skills a bit). After a while I asked a Colombian girl named Carolay to dance. It was a nice girl and a good dancer (though Colombian/Cuban style so it was a bit hard as she did not know how to turn) and we ended up talking to her. Afterwards I danced with some of her friends, but soon after she came looking for me at the dance floor and we ended up dancing a second time. This time though, the vibe was way different, she became much more sensual and suddenly became very ‘angry’ and shouted that I should feel the rhythm better and she in invigorated these words by grabbing my hands and putting them on her butt. Her rhythm felt indeed quite nice but being the oblivious Dutch guy familiar only with the Dutch salsa parties I was seriously doubting myself if she was trying to seduce me or really ‘mad’ for not feeling the rhythm enough.
Being polite I tried to talk to her a bit afterwards but she was a popular girl on the dance floor so I didn’t have the opportunity and decided to talk to her friends instead and hoped that she would join us soon. She did and we had one other dance, but somehow the vibe changed once more and she became quite cold instead. I really got confused and didn’t know what to do. Her fiends gave me their nr., but I couldn’t get hers unfortunately and so called it a night.
Some days later, Rahiem (my dance teacher) called me how I was doing and I explained the story. He was laughing so hard as he told me that in Colombian salsa culture I handled the entire situation wrong! Apparently, when a girl accepts a second dance with you she wants to come home with you, let alone if she looks you up at the dance floor and dances the way she did. However, being a highly temperamental Colombian she only gave me a window of a song and a half.
Whenever I think of this story I start laughing again as the situation was so weird to me, but it will be a valuable lesson. In a couple of months time I plan to stay in Cali and Medellin for about a month each to take salsa and language classes and go to the salsa parties as well. Knowing this piece of information will hopefully help me avoid more of these weird situations and help me in other ways perhaps too.