Friday Night at Cien Fuegos

Last Friday night, I had made plans to go dancing with Sirley at Cien Fuegos.  It was long overdue, and we posted an invite to the Medellin Couchsurfing group to see who else would be interested.

People began arriving at 8pm for the group lesson.  It turns out, Thursday nights lessons are for beginner/intermediates, while Friday night lessons are for more advanced dancers.

Since I had some trouble with the combination from the prior Thursday, I knew I’d be out of my league.  But, over the course of an hour, I got it down, roughly.

Probably one of the most complicated combinations I’d been taught so far, and I had no intention to try to practice it that night!

After the lesson, there’s this dead spot where the early arrivals are in a lull because the normal dance crowd won’t arrive until at least 10pm, nor does the live band go on before then.

But once people did begin to arrive, the club quickly filled up.  In fact, at its peak, it was full and busier than the first time I had gone on a Saturday night.

We were sitting at the bar due to the high cost of buying a bottle of liquor, which is a prerequisite for certain tables, or large groups like ours.

I learned the bar is where the single arrivals go – be it women or men, and therefore isn’t a bad place to be stationed for the night.  Approaching a woman on a bar stool is a lot easier than walking up to a table of seated people.

The short story is we all danced, A LOT, that night.  The band was a different one than I’d heard before and I enjoyed them more than the normal band.

I had a goal to ask 3 women not amongst my social group to dance.  Now that I’ve got some experience under my belt, I feel more comfortable asking strangers to dance.

In Colombia, the women will always wait for the man to approach and ask them to dance.  So if you want to dance, you can’t be shy.

I ended up asking about 5 ladies to dance, in addition to the 3 amongst my friends.  Of the 5, one was a professional dancer from the club.

Dancing with her is like dancing with a teacher – great form, knows the typical movements (although I might not have been able to signal them properly).

I definitely feel a better connection dancing with some women more than others, and I’m sure they experience the same thing.

By a quarter to 2am, I was sufficiently sweaty, and worn out from the night.  I said my goodbyes and headed home.

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Update: Cien Fuegos closed as of April 2013.

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