Unending Epilogue: month 1

April 2009

As far as Salsa is concerned I am having more difficulty adjusting to the time difference than in the past. This is because I had been getting up early in the morning for much of April while I was travelling across the UK, France and the Lowlands. Even a full week after returning, I often find myself feeling sleepy by 5 PM. Thankfully I stopped getting up before 7 in the morning.

The process of getting back to life in America is moving slowly. I suppose it is faster than it was moving to the UK though. I begun the process opening a bank account on my third day back and received some account information within a week after arriving. Although things like debit cards and full online access information have not arrived yet, it sure beats taking nearly a month to get an account in the UK.

Originally I did not expect to get a mobile phone for a while. I still haven’t gotten one, but I think I will end up getting one – after completing my bank account details. Already one person asked me for cell phone (or mobile phone) information. I imagine I won’t use it much, but I suppose I should make myself “reachable” by methods other than e-mail. I’ll probably end with pay-as-you-go (or prepaid) phone – quite possibly with Virgin Mobile (a British outfit no less).

For this monthly update (no guarantees that I will keep this up), there has been only one Salsa outing. I meant to go to a second night but combination of a headache caused by a cold and some surprise dinner guests put that plan out the door. The one time I did go out I felt at less than top shape possibly because of combination of general inactivity and sleep issues neither of which had been helped by the aforementioned cold and headache.

It took no time to catch up with some friends I made from my last visit once at one of the regular hotspots (I’ll refrain from naming specific places or names local – at least for now). Heck, they even remembered my name too (fortunately I remembered theirs too). I also saw a lot of people I did not see before. I know it’s a mistake to judge a scene by one night but this one night made me think of Sergio saying that many good dancers don’t go out on local nights here.

As I was writing the last paragraph, I realized of a personal bias – not necessarily fair but perhaps illuminating. I rate followers based on how they dance with me. They could look good dancing with some other people, but I probably would think less of them if they were unable to dance well with me. On the other hand I rate leaders solely based on how they look dancing with others. This makes perfect sense, but it does mean there presumably will be some disconnect between how I rate other leads compared to how followers rate same leads.

Anyhow the reason why I got into this talk is that I saw two new leads I had not seen before who I thought would have kicked ass if they showed up in London – arguably better than many of “names” dropped in advertisements on web and on fliers for big events. (Heck, I think some of those name guys are quite awful – neither distinctive, entertaining nor aesthetically pleasing.) It also made me think that I haven’t gotten very far – even though I won’t see I haven’t made any progress recently but it seemed to me that some people here have made much bigger progress in last several months while I have been doing very little. Oh well. Maybe I’m doomed to plateau and fall behind the times. Who knows?

Finally I really should not comment on the Cambridge scene anymore – I’ll just say that I still do keep track of what’s going on there and that it is not lacking drama and intrigue.