Dancing under a highway in Medellin
Some who wander are lost
Love notes from Siel is a weekly newsletter from Siel, who’s currently on a Remote Year trip around the world. If you love it, subscribe for free.
Dear friend —
While packing up to leave Lima for Medellin, I came up with a grand plan. I would go salsa dancing a lot, and via dance, become fluent in Spanish. Two birds, one stone! This seemed totally possible despite the fact that I’d tried to do this very thing while living in Los Angeles and not picked up any Spanish save for the sentence “Yo no se mañana,” the refrain of a popular song, after hearing it a few hundred times. I had, however, learned to salsa! Perhaps, in Colombia, I could make this whole salsa-Spanish combo happen. Everywhere I’d go there’d be music, dance, conversation!
Medellin is a vibrant mix of lush greenery, concrete, and colorful public art. Like Lima, Medellin’s often overcast, but warmer and rainier — jungle weather. The first thing I bought was an umbrella, delivered to my apartment of the month via Uber to my doorman Alex, who, when I attempted Spanish, couldn’t stop laughing at me. He didn’t seem to be making fun, exactly — he just found the situation hilarious, and was a giggly kind of guy —
Step one to dancing my way to Spanish fluency: Find out where the salsa clubs are. Google brought up a bunch of articles on the topic, but all of them had been written pre-COVID, and many of the clubs had closed. The ones that hadn’t weren’t great about detailing when exactly they were open and what time the dancing started — an issue with salsa clubs around the world, perhaps, because the same was true of the clubs in L.A. You kind of needed to already be in the salsa community to find out where the good dance spots were.
Easiest way to join the salsa community: Take dance classes. I found a club called Social Club offering intermediate salsa classes with a guy called Edwin. But would I actually be able to follow the class with my yo no se mañana level of spanish? I scoured Social Club’s feed until I found a post tagging Edwin. When I messaged, he wrote back almost instantly: “Yo no creo que haya problema, la danza y el mundo es grande y nos podemos comunicar con el cuerpo.”
Hopefully I’d learn to communicar not just con el cuerpo but also en español. I signed up for the class, then two other Remote Year girls signed up with me. On the appointed Tuesday, we snuck out of a city orientation session early to go dance —
The Uber dropped us off at the edge of a gigantic highway roundabout, which seemed like definitely the wrong spot, except when we walked down a concrete path, there Social Club was, under the highway —
Social Club is basically a one-room dance studio with a bar, one long wall fully open to an outdoor courtyard. A dozen or so people sat at the tables there, waiting for the lesson to begin. Edwin arrived a few minutes after we did. “Siel?” he asked when we met, then started the class with a string of Spanish words I couldn’t decipher.
But the salsa came back to me! The class went all over the place, from the basic step to a complicated routine that lost a lot of people, especially the guys. It was fun to dance again though. Afterwards, we cleared out so a bachata class could get started. The girls I’d arrived with wanted to go to a salsa club, but I wasn’t dressed for it — I’d come to class in workout clothes — and declined. We called our Ubers to our separate destinations.
Then a guy came over: The bachata class was short one girl, did any of us want to dance?
My new dance partner’s name was Miguel, I learned. The class had already been meeting for nine weeks or so but I was able to follow it because the students had started as total beginners. Miguel spoke some English, learned in school and through travel, and translated a phrase for me here and there, none of which I was able to commit to memory.
Then we rotated, and I was paired with a new guy. “Perdido,” he said, laughing.
“Um,” I said, “No hablo mucho Español….”
“English?” he asked.
“Si!”
“I’m lost.” He laughed again. But he wasn’t so bad. He just hadn’t quite picked up the very end of the routine. People laughed a lot during the class — the teacher must have been pretty funny, though I didn’t understand any of the jokes.
After class, Miguel and I followed each other on Instagram, and I called my final Uber of the night. But when the app showed the driver had arrived, I couldn’t see the car anywhere.
“Dónde estás?” I texted.
The driver back a long string of words I didn’t understand.
“Uno momento,” I wrote. I started running around the area looking for a red car until I no longer knew where I was.
“Oh no,” I said to myself. “Perdido.”
Then on a ramp up ahead, I spotted the driver waving at me.
Love,
Siel
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Oh, Siel, this reminded me of the book I didn’t write “How Salsa Ruined My Life”. There’s a Miguel in that story too! Have fun!