Brasil I: São Paulo

I'm getting much better at packing light. I could've done better, but this time was certainly a step up from my previous trips anywhere (even some weekend-long "trips" to Toronto): one backpack and a little bag-o'-important-stuff (the contents of which could have fit into the backpack). Win!

The trip down, being a direct flight, was much better than (i.e., half the duration of) last time, so I actually had the energy for the 2-hour bus/subway-ride + 20-minute walk to the hostel... saving me the R$100 (~$70 CDN) a taxi would've cost me. But the bus ride was actually the best part of my day so far: I chatted with some locals and a tourist from Porto Alegre, which was lots of fun, not to mention great exercise for my very rusty Portuguese. I'm continually surprised by Brasilians. One of the women I was chatting with on the bus invited me to stay at her house for the two nights that I'll be here in São Paulo. I couldn't believe it! I was so touched, and I really wanted to accept, but I wanted to be in the area where my hostel is, so I didn't. Maybe next time...

Preparations

I'm slowly inching my way toward starting to pack for my trip. I'm determined to pack even lighter than I did last time, my goal being a single not-entirely-full backpack. Some things that probably seem excessive but which I plan on bringing are a Portuguese dictionary and language book (not a phrasebook... I plan on doing some actual studying while I'm travelling), as well as a notebook and my sets of flash cards (of which I need to make more before I go... they take forever to cut and hole-punch :|!). I am torn about bringing my netbook. Part of the reason I bought it in the first place was for this sort of thing, but this time I am doing quite a bit more travelling *around*. Last time I stayed in one city and could therefore safely deposit my belongings at the hostel and not have to worry about them at all for the whole two+ weeks. This time, not only am I travelling through three cities, but for the first two there's going to be quite the trek from the airport to my hostel, meaning I'm reluctant to go completely broke on taxis, let alone twice. Normally I'd be fine about wandering my way through the city since I blend in well enough (pretty much all Brasilians I've met have told me I look Brasilian... whatever that means, since Brasilians can look like anything :P)... but the giant backpack is *just* a little conspicuous. (Just a tad.) I think it'll probably come down to whether it'll fit nicely in my bag along with everything else. :|

But my preparations so far haven't consisted solely of deliberation! I finally booked my hostel for São Paulo. I don't know why I put it off so long, considering it's the first place I'm going, but it turns out I was just in time: a day later and I wouldn't have been able to book online! :| I also went out today to exchange some money, and then I went to Shoppers looking for these little plastic travel tins to put cream-type stuff in. I didn't find what I was looking for, but I did find this:

Which is a bajillion times better! :D!

I can't even begin to express how much I love containers. It's probably a bit unhealthy, the extent to which I do. I can't explain it. My friend suggested that it's because they're practical, which is probably true. But even that fails to fully explain the intense satisfaction I derive from finding the Perfect Container. I mean, when I come across some sort of nice box or bag or tin, or even bottle/jar (or envelope), I always want to take it and save it for some kind of special use. And I'll try to think of things I could use it for, but if it's a *really* nice container, I don't want to hastily assign it to some purpose and then not have it for something that it's even better suited for. So it'll just end up sitting somewhere collecting dust instead of containing things! (Travesty!) BUT! On the rare occasion, I'll have some particular item(s) that I need to contain -- they could be multiple instances of a single item, or various types of items, or maybe even just one Important Item -- and I serendipitously happen across a Perfect Container! It holds all of the items and is just the right size for them: little to no extra room for them to roll or jumble around in, messing up their Perfect configuration. The Perfect Container does exactly what I wanted it to do -- nothing more, nothing less. And actually *putting* the items into the Perfect Container and then basking in their Perfect Containment: inexplicably satisfying!

So I must admit, the container (set) that I purchased above is not a Perfect Container. It has more bottles and tins-of-various-sizes than I actually need. But I do need some of them, and think of all the things I could put in the others! (Not that I'll be able to decide what to put in them...) But that's not all! It's specifically a carry-on toiletry set, so it conforms to the "three-ounce containers in a one-quart clear, sealable plastic bag" thing. The bag is exactly one quart! So awesome! And obviously it's designed for the bottles and tins it comes with, so no extra loose space for them to jumble around in! :D!

I think this is the most gleeful anything has made me in the last couple of days. Including hearing that my iGEM team is getting funding that we're going to use for DNA synthesis (which is really, really awesome). Make of this fact what you will.

Actually, on second thought, it probably ties with finally finding the elusive *good* guava Juice at Zehrs, on my way from the currency exchange place to Shoppers. :9

Quando eu volto ao Brasil...

On Monday afternoon I'm leaving for Brasil: I have a short two-and-a-half weeks for this trip (including a day of transit on either end) before I hurry back to start classes again in January. In retrospect, I must have been just a little bit crazy to go to Rio by myself in the summer. I've spent my entire life in southwestern Ontario and, until a year or two ago, had been to barely any cities other than the ones I've lived in. I'd only ever flown a couple of times since I've been old enough to remember, and both times were direct flights, only a few hours long, with friends who knew what they were doing... so really all I had to worry about was not losing sight of them. My next step up from that? Three different planes, 24 hours, and 8500 kilometres south to a major city in a country whose language I didn't speak. Alone. (For additional perspective: I'm ashamed to say that at this time, I didn't even know how to use the TTC. Like, at all. Total public transit n00b.) Yay adventure! In any case, not only did I survive Rio unscathed, but I'm fairly certain that I leveled up a few times in my Travel ability, plus learned a little Portuguese along the way. But more than that: even in the short time I was there, there were several moments when I felt -- more than I'd ever felt before -- like I belonged. Kind of strange, not even speaking the language, but so it was. To live in a place where such great music and dance are everywhere...

So I'm going back, for another all-too-brief stint, to get a taste of a couple more parts of this amazing country. This time, I'll have a couple of nights to sample São Paulo, then a few days in Salvador, and finally a week in Natal, where my Brasilian friend (who lives in Toronto) will also be visiting his dad there. So this time I'll have the benefit of knowing a local! And not that Christmas has ever been that huge of a deal in my family, but since I will be away over Christmas and missing out on extended-family festivities, it'll be nice to at least be spending it with my friend and his dad. :]

Blues dancing! (and TWO sets of free dance workshops this weekend!)

The other day I heard about something called "blues dancing" for the first time. No idea what it was. So I checked it out on YouTube, and man! I am now desperate to try this myself. Man oh man! I'm sure there must be some kind of structure to it, like with any partner dance (all those that I know of, anyway :|), but it *looks* so natural. Like pure musicality. It must feel so amazing to dance. *_*!

Watching that clip makes me think of something my brother wrote about what his favourite music is: "Whatever music makes me feel like I've just been punched in the soul. IN THE SOUL." Haha... Okay, maybe that quote isn't *entirely* applicable, but I like it. :P Seriously though, when I listen to a really good song, some parts just kill me -- like the climax of an amazing guitar solo... or a trombone just slinking its way in at the perfect moment... or a single, repeated note of a piano breaking a near-silence after a slow dénouement... I only wish I could properly describe the feeling I get. It's a physical reaction: it just grabs hold of me by the heart, and I have to fight the urge to writhe with the amazingness of the music. It's almost like cringing, only really, really good...

Okay, epic fail at describing it, but oh well. In any case, actually *dancing* to those awesome parts of music is even better. Orders of magnitude better. I mean dancing *to* them. Like a build-up comes, and then *pah!* -- you hit the accent, hard, right when the drums do. Soooooo good... Man, now I want to dance -- I was thinking of salsa here (to add the the three different genres of the songs I was thinking of above). Hehe. Anyway, blues dancing looks like it's full of that kind of thing. Actually dancing the music. Estou morrendo de vontade de tentar!

I'd looked around online, right after I heard of it, for blues dancing in Toronto, and didn't come up with much. But (coincidentally?) yesterday I started seeing something about a blues group on Facebook, wanting to promote blues dancing in Toronto! And today they announced that they're organizing a social in January!! :D!! WINNNN! So ridiculously excited for it. :D

Something else I'm excited for is this Sunday: City Dance Corps recently moved to a new location, and they're having an open house with free classes from noon to 5 pm! They're offering a whole bunch of styles, including house (!), which looks insanely hard but also ridiculously fun, and I've been wanting to try it for a while now. If that wasn't enough, I came across another all-afternoon free-lesson event, also this Sunday: the Tré Armstrong Give-Back Free Dance Workshop, which will not only include house (!), but also pop 'n' lock (!!) and capoeira (!!!!). I would wish these events were on different days so I could go to both, but this Sunday would be my only chance anyway: I'm already missing all the Christmas and Boxing Day salsa parties because I leave for Brasil next Monday. :]

Anything to stop clockwatching...

Holy frig. This is just getting ridiculous. I can't even begin to imagine how I would experience jet-lag, because my internal clock is completely busted as it is. I've become nocturnal. I miss the sun!

I've done the nocturne thing before, but it's always been a 6-am-to-4-pm-sleeping sort of thing (give or take a couple hours)... not sleeping at *noon* and waking at *10 pm*. WTF. At least with getting up at 4 pm, you can call it "staying up late" and "getting up late". Really late, sure, but you're still "getting up late". 10 pm? That's just night-time. There's no denying it. When you wake up at 10 pm, you are waking up *just in time for night*. Ugh. It's awful.

I'd say I'd make a good vampire, but not only am I not pale enough (and, as my brother has kindly informed me, not sparkly enough), I am also not *consistently* nocturnal enough. And it's this fact that really has me messed up lately: I've many times before declared that I've been temporally disoriented, usually when I've been off of school or whatever and days of the week lose all meaning. But at least then you still have *some* sense of the passage of time... like "two sleeps ago I went to the movies"... at least for within the last couple of days, anyway. :| At this point, I only *wish* I could meaningfully count time in sleeps!

The last week or so for me has looked something like this:

Tuesday: sleep at 4 am; wake at 8 am

Wednesday: sleep at 9 am; get rudely awoken (!!) at 10 am; sleep at 12 pm; wake at 9 pm

Thursday: sleep at 1 pm; wake at 9 pm

Friday: nap for ~ 1 hour at 12 pm; sleep at 9 pm

Saturday: wake at 5 am (there's hope!)

Sunday: sleep at 6 am; wake at 7 pm (!!)

Monday: sleep at 8 pm

Tuesday: wake at 2 am (argh...)

Like seriously, WTF? Can any of that be counted as days in *any time zone*? No wonder this stupid sore throat has been lingering all week... But even before I started staying awake for random periods of time before passing out -- while I was just being regular ol' nocturnal -- I started experiencing a phenomenon which I have dubbed, perhaps ironically, the Awake-with-the-World Effect (or AWE, for short).

See, there's a key difference between between "staying up late" and being outright nocturnal, especially if you're prancing on the late edge of nocturnal (i.e., a noon-ish bedtime) instead of diving under the covers as soon as the sun comes up and staying there until it's safely past the horizon. When you "stay up late", everyone else is asleep! You're there on your computer, doing something completely useless for some number of hours, and the World is snoring in its bed. Then eventually you go to sleep, and then the World wakes up and goes on about its business, with you finally arriving fashionably late to the Party of the Living. So you have this nice, albeit short, window of being Awake with the World: between 4 pm and whenever the World goes to sleep. This is what typically defines a Day. Whether you have one hour of post-AW wakefulness or six, it makes little difference to your perception of the passage of Days. (Note that if you're like some people I know, and wake up at 5 in the morning and sleep at 9 pm, exactly the same thing applies, only the World is arriving late to *your* party. ... or you're the lame-O** who shows up super early, before anyone else gets there.)

If you're nocturnal, on the other hand, the World wakes up, and you have a short period of AW before you go to sleep: maybe you have breakfast, chat with your housemates, email a prof, make a phone-call or two. Then eventually you go to sleep. And then you wake up that same "day", to (gasp!) a SECOND period of AW! You have a late dinner with friends (not that it's late for you, since really it's your breaktfast), hang out a while, and then the World goes to sleep. And you proceed to read the entire archive of a webcomic that started in 2002, until finally the World wakes up again. But when is this new period of AW taking place? Is it AW1 of the World's "day", or AW2 of your "day"? Do you even feel each continuous period of wakefulness as if it's a "day", despite being detached from the World for a long period smack in the middle of it? Or do you start counting AWs instead of "days"?

Or do you just sort of lose all sense of time altogether?

Probably most people don't have much data on which to base an answer to any of this. I unfortunately have collected a fair amount, and yeah... I kind of just lose all sense of time. And I think it's partially because there are twice as many AWs to keep track of as you'd have days to track, partially because there's no particularly natural way to group these AWs meaningfully (i.e., in terms of the World's "days", which is as psychologically unnatural as pairing Tuesday evening with Wednesday morning would be to most people, or in terms of your own "days", which may be a more natural pairing, but isn't really a useful grouping at all, for most purposes)... and partially because anyone experiencing AWE to begin with is probably pretty messed up in the head as it is.

[** I *wish* I could be one of these lame-Os. I get SO much more done in a day, and I feel so much more awake and like the day is so much longer, when I wake up early and go to bed early. It feels great, and I love it. Unfortunately, this early-bird routine doesn't jive well with social dancing, and I right now I couldn't imagine giving up salsa nights for a super-healthy schedule. :|]

Leadership skills

I've been trying to learn how to lead. Through my involvement with iGEM, amongst other things, I have a fair amount of experience with leading people. But *groups* of people. Not individual people, and certainly not while they're dancing. D:

Granted, it was only very recently that I started to try, but man oh man is it hard! Like frig! I think that I would struggle with it more than most follows, because it seems like most follows have at least a vague idea of the patterns they know... i.e., they actually know some patterns, to at least some sketchy extent. I imagine it's fairly common for a lead to ask a follow how to do a certain pattern and for the follow to not know how to teach the lead for it, but as a rule, follows seem to at least know their own steps for things, more or less. And I can *do* quite a number of things... I mean, I've only been at this for a year and a bit, so I definitely still consider myself a beginning dancer with a *ton* to learn, and my technique still sucks (actually, in a lot of ways, it's gotten much worse since I stopped taking ballroom in the spring :(!) -- but I'm at least at the point where, going out dancing salsa, I can follow most leads without too much trouble. But I have absolutely *no* idea what the hell I'm doing while I'm dancing. I don't even know how many times someone has asked me to show them something I just did, and I didn't have the faintest idea what it was that I'd just done. Like, four seconds earlier.

A friend of mine is continually shocked at the extent to which my dancing is devoid of conscious control. And I guess when it's brought to my attention, I find it kind of weird too. But then I think about it, and it's actually very much in keeping with other stuff for me... like for guitar, to show someone how to play a song that I know, I have to just play it myself, observe/figure out what I'm doing, and then show it to them. I don't keep any of that stuff in explicit memory at all, it seems. Only *while* I'm learning a song is my brain aware of what I have to do, and it tells my fingers to do it. But once my fingers have learned how to play the song, my brain is all, "Weeeell, looks like my job here is done!" and forgets the whole thing. Same goes for dance: it's been quite a while since I've been to any kind of patterns class*, but I usually learn the patterns pretty quickly and often end up helping my partner figure out how to lead it. But once we've got it, and *I* no longer have to worry about what it is that we're doing, my brain seems to promptly discard that no-longer-useful information and leave my body to do what it knows how to do. (*I guess I don't like patterns classes because, being a follow (and therefore entirely subject to the whim of my lead), I can't actually use them myself, so I invariably forget them anyway. So I stopped taking them once I no longer had a partner with whom I was learning on an ongoing basis -- it just seemed kind of pointless... But I must be missing something here: so many girls go to patterns classes, so there must be something to be gained by follows by taking them! Some benefit I'm just ignorant of. Someone enlighten me! :|!)

For practical purposes this mindless dancing has always seemed to work well enough for me, but a) there's something slightly disconcerting about having little-to-no conscious control of my body while I'm dancing :|, and b) now that I want to learn how to lead, I have no idea what there even *is* out there to be learned, in terms of what patterns exist -- patterns that I do all the time as a follow.

In any case, patterns classes just gained some obvious value for me, and I think I'm going to start taking some beginner ones with UW Mambo Club next term. I'll just buy a pack of these so the dudes don't try to dance with me:

I'm thinking "Scoundrel", in black.

The piano tuner

My grandma recently sent me her piano. She'd been wanting to get rid of it for quite a while, and last week it finally ended up in our living room. None of us play (I took lessons for a few months when I was like... in grade three), but this means I'm going to learn.

It's very rare that I hear music being played in person these days. In the past year I'd gotten used to being around it a lot, and it was so, so great. For me, finally being around people who played music all the time was like... like in those Claritin commercials, where that hazy layer gets peeled off the screen and suddenly the whole world is in the most vivid colour.

It's been a few months now since I've had that in my life, and that haze gradually settled back in. I only just realized this because, right now, there is a piano tuner downstairs who was plunking away for the past couple of hours, making my new piano sound like it should. And now, listening to her play bits and pieces of random things to test it out is making me want to cry. I'd forgotten what this felt like, this thing that surges up inside me. This thing that, once the silence resumes, vanishes almost as quickly as it came.

A felicidade é como a pluma

Que o vento vai levando pelo ar

Voa tão leve

Mas tem a vida breve

Precisa que haja vento sem parar

Avocado seeds

I really like avocado seeds for some reason. I don't know why. Maybe because they're so giant and smooth and round...

They're kind of cute. :3! It always makes me a bit sad when I accidentally score them with the knife while cutting the avocado... :|

Nutella

Today my friend lamented to me, "I have an interesting relationship with Nutella. I enjoy it, but I never know where to fit it into my meals." Laughing a bit, I realized that although I've never had a problem consuming Nutella when I feel for it, there are a lot of other things in my life that tend to remain on the sidelines along with his Nutella. Things I enjoy doing, like playing guitar, or listening to all kinds of music that I like, or studying Portuguese, or reading, or exercising. When I'm doing these things, I love it, but somehow I seem to have a lot of difficulty actually working them into my day-to-day activities. I don't know why this is, considering how much time I spend sitting around doing nothing at all.

Another of my Nutellas is really good juice. Like this amazing guava or mango nectar you can get in this big glass bottle. I only ever drink juice like this on its own. Juice like this really isn't a beverage: it's too rich, too thick, and too sweet to be refreshing or to drink with most food, and it's such a good experience on its own that it's kind of a waste to sully it with other flavours. It's like a dessert, or a snack, almost. Only not a subset of these categories. It's its own category altogether: Juice.

Sometimes I'll get a craving for Juice, so I get a cup and go to the fridge. But when I open the fridge, along with the desired Juice, I see orange juice! And seeing the orange juice makes me conscious of being thirsty, and the taste of orange juice is so salient to me that it takes over the part of my mind that imagines eating or drinking things and causes me to seek out these things. And so I have to drink the orange juice. And then by the time I've had some orange juice, I no longer feel for the originally desired Juice. And you can't squander Juice by drinking it when you aren't already salivating for it: futilely trying to create the Full Juice Experience (a.k.a. Finally Drinking the Sweet, Sweet Juice You Were Craving) by simply drinking the Juice any old time. It doesn't work, and then you have no Juice left for the next time you actually crave it and therefore have the precious opportunity to enjoy the Full Juice Experience. I've made this mistake many times before, and I rued my actions.

My feet's first steps into the world of dance (Part II)

Along with my decision to abandon my lovely black Diamants in favour of avoiding intense pain (and possible nerve damage) came a mild-to-moderate hatred of Latin ballroom shoes. I'd tried literally dozens of shoes from various brands, and nothing came even close to fitting like those Diamants. But I really did need some sort of dance shoe, so I decided to buy a pair of practice shoes:

The ones I got were like these, but in black leather. They are certainly a lot more comfortable than strappy high-heeled sandals, but aren't the prettiest things... and although they're lace-up, they also stretch over time... so, soon enough, my scrawny feet couldn't be snugly held by these shoes unless, in addition to the insoles I already had to use, I also wore thick socks... even less pretty (especially since I never got around to buying thick socks in black, and instead wore my plentiful white sport socks :P). So I set aside my notions of going dancing in nice skirts, and settled for nice tops with pants.

A couple of months later, partially because I started to really want to wear skirts again and partially because by then I was being... um... "strongly encouraged" by my studio to compete in a Pro-Am (beginner-est beginner level), I recommenced my hunt for decent-looking shoes. I needed something in a low heel though (thanks to my conveniently located nerve x_X), and since at least 90% of Latin shoes have at least a 2.5-inch heel, this criterion made my already impossible task even more impossible. So when one store I went to said I could order a style I was interested in in whatever heel-height and front-width I wanted, I decided to give that a try and ordered this shoe from International (plus a left one) in a 2-inch heel:

The guy at the store told me I needed an extra-narrow width front, so I got that as well. And I patiently waited out the two months it was supposed to take, plus an extra couple of weeks for some mysterious delay, until finally my shoes arrived! I tried them on, only to find that the extra-narrow width meant that the upper opening of the front was too narrow, and the sides cut into my feet. Boo... The other thing was actually something I'd been wondering about when I'd ordered, and I don't think the people at the store understood my question when I'd asked about it... It seems that the whole "custom heel" thing really is just that: the heel of your choice. Which means that they just take the shoe that's designed for, say, a 2.5-inch heel and tack on a 2-inch heel instead. But the angle between the front- and mid-sections of the shoe are still intended for a 2.5-inch heel, so if you take the shoe and hold the front flat against the floor, a 2-inch heel will be suspended half an inch above the ground. And then, when you put this chimeric shoe on, you're left balancing on the rounded back edge of the heel that's too short for the shoe it's attached to. I have no idea if this is the case for all brands, especially when they actually let you choose from various heel heights in a drop-down menu when you order online, but I'm not particularly inclined to invest any more money finding out. Fortunately, these shoes I was able to return.

But I had a spotlight performance coming up at my studio (during occasional practice parties, students can perform a short routine with their partner/instructor), and I was sick of having only my black practice shoes, so when I went to return the chimeric Internationals, I bought these:

They're a make I'd never heard of, called Elegance... 2-inch heel, pretty comfortable once I put in some insoles, and I could wear pretty much whatever color with them. And unlike my black practice shoes, these I could actually tighten enough to fit snugly with bare feet, meaning I finally had shoes I could wear a skirt with! Woohoo! And yeah, they're intended to be practice shoes... but they were by far the best find I'd made so far, so these became my "good shoes" that were only for the studio, to keep the soles nice. Because I'd been wearing them out dancing, where people wear street shoes, the soles of my black practice shoes were by then already pretty awful and slippery on the studio floor... so now they became my designated "beater shoes", which I could continue to abuse with impunity.

And abuse them I did! By the time summer rolled around (May, for those of us who are university students), my dance partner had graduated, and not long after that I was wrapping up my own lessons at the ballroom studio -- lessons I'd already purchased months before. I wasn't sure where I'd be in the fall, or even during the summer, so, as much as I loved it, I put the ballroom on hold... but I'd started spending a lot of time in Toronto, dancing salsa in my practice shoes. They've been worn on (dry) pavement and stomped on countless times by dance shoes, street shoes, wedge heels, stilettos and everything in between. So not only are the suede soles a lost cause, but the leather is pretty ravaged in places... and eventually the sole came right off one of the heels:

I affectionately dubbed them my ghetto-ass shoes and continued to wear them all the time, but my acknowledgment of their ghettoness restricted my attire to jeans + tops-of-varying-degrees-of-casualness/niceness (which I guess is probably what I tended to wear anyway). Not that it was great quality to begin with, but even the shoe bag that came with these shoes was starting to get pretty ghetto itself, a hole having been worn in one part, presumably by the heels of the shoes. I continued to use my ghetto-ass bag (to match my ghetto-ass shoes), and the hole gradually grew, and somehow spawned a second hole, until I could put my arm right through the bag without opening it. Eventually, I wasn't even really comfortable calling it a bag anymore:

More like disintegrating-mass-formerly-known-as-bag...

I still used it for a while, despite its highly questionable structural integrity.

I mentioned that this summer I'd been in Toronto a lot for salsa... by "a lot", I mean often four nights a week, occasionally more. I live about 1.5 hours away from Toronto proper (on clear roads, traffic permitting), so I certainly wasn't driving back and forth every day. Fortunately for me, a friend of mine who is as much of a salsa addict as I had become happens to live within blocks of three of the best salsa spots in Toronto, and is awesome enough to let me crash at his place in the name of salsa. So I was saved from being a complete homeless-in-Toronto salsa hobo, with my awesome shoes and "bag", and instead got to be a mere crashing-at-people's-houses salsa bum.

My feet's first steps into the world of dance (Part I)

About a year and one month ago, I started dancing: completely out of the blue, I was invited by a friend to a free beginners' salsa lesson at a local venue, and I had an amazing time despite struggling with the basic step, let alone a right-hand turn. Dancing was something that I'd wished I could do since forever, but it was always that far-off sort of wish, like "Man, I wish I could play the piano..." I'm fairly certain that I wouldn't have taken that first step any time soon if it hadn't been for this, so I'm really, really happy that, that first evening, I'd happened to be feeling miserable enough that I'd badly needed a pick-me-up, but not quite so miserable that I would turn down doing something so randomly spontaneous despite it sounding like it'd be fun.

We started taking lessons the next week.

There isn't much of a salsa scene in my city (and practically nowhere to learn it), so we signed up at a nearby ballroom studio that my friend knew of and started learning almost a dozen different ballroom dances, including salsa. I loved it. Together, we were mostly interested in learning Latin dances (salsa, bachata, merengue, mambo, cha-cha, samba, rumba...), but I absolutely loved waltz and tango as well (and, though I got only a tiny taste of them, Viennese waltz and Argentine tango were even more amazing).

When I started taking lessons, I went in my everyday footwear, which happened to look like this (minus the grimy crap on the toes, which they acquired this past summer):


I've always had a problem finding comfortable shoes for reasons that I'm still not quite sure of (I suspect it has something to do with my arches, or lack thereof, and the fact that my feet are long mostly because I have long toes), so when I stumble upon a pair of shoes that are actually comfortable, I will wear them *everywhere*. So I love these shoes, and it's a good thing that I generally dress very casually (read: jeans + tank/tee/sweater/hoodie), because, well, they're very casual. But what's more, being runners, they *suck* for spinning... uh... and for dancing in general. So, after a couple months of taking lessons, I reluctantly set about finding myself some dance shoes. (I admit I was kind of excited, since this would afford me the added benefit of being able to wear nice clothes -- even skirts (!!) and stuff! -- when I went out dancing. ... I am not generally a skirt person, but I suppose I was getting into the Latin-dance spirit. :P)

Now, I thought I'd always had problems finding regular shoes... turns out those problems did not begin to compare to the impossibility of finding Latin ballroom shoes (not even taking into account that, because they are handmade and generally imported from overseas, there are only a handful of stores in Ontario that sell them, almost all of which are in the GTA... which is a drivable-but-certainly-not-convenient 1-2 hours from where I live).

Latin ballroom shoes seem to take innumerable forms, but tend to look something like this:


The important features to note are that they are (a) high-heeled, (b) strappy, and (c) open-toe (unless they are practice shoes), and each of these aspects can be problematic to dancers with non-average feet. For me, (a) was primarily a nuisance, but a tolerable one. I don't typically wear heels, and when I do, it's for some particular occasion -- and then my feet are assured a nice restful return to the world of flats, where they can proceed to recover from the traumatic experience. This doesn't work so well when you're dancing almost every day, but this problem seemed relatively unavoidable, so I took the "suck it up and deal" approach.

The variety resulting from (b) contributes greatly to the innumerable forms that Latin shoes can take. There's the traditional strap, the T-strap, the cross-strap (around the ankle or around the arch), the double cross-strap, and then miscellaneous variations of the above. I didn't expect that this would be a major consideration for me until I tried on several pairs of shoes and came to the realization that I don't have "big" feet, as I'd always thought (I'm 5'6" and I wear a size 9): I have *long* feet (as mentioned, primarily because I have long toes, which comes back to bite me in the butt for (c)). My feet, not to mention my ankles, are actually pretty damn scrawny. This means that, in order for my foot to actually remain secured in the shoe, my foot itself, not just my ankle, must be tethered down, making the last two options (around-arch cross-strap and double cross-strap) the only viable ones for me. (Ironically, the T-strap style, designed to better hold the foot in the shoe, is actually far worse for my scrawny feet than the traditional strap alone: the T-strap part, connecting the ankle strap to the front of the shoe means that you can only tighten the ankle strap so much before you start contorting the shoe in bizarre ways... i.e., I can't tighten them nearly enough to actually secure my ankle, let alone the rest of my foot.)

But (a) and (b) pale in comparison to (c), which ends up conferring the most impossibility to the task of finding a shoe that fits me. As a rule, larger shoe sizes mean bigger shoes -- not just longer, but also wider and deeper (or "taller", as the case may be). As I said, my feet are scrawny, but they are also flat, in more ways than one. The front couple inches of my feet consist pretty much solely of my stupid, long toes, which, also being scrawny, are not particularly tall... and so my toes slide right through the vast majority of open-toe shoes and onto the floor. This is obviously bad. The fitters at every shoe store I've been to therefore tell me that I need narrow (or extra-narrow) width shoes, so I won't slide through. But my feet are in fact not only average width, but my arches collapse (as opposed to having rigid flat feet), so when I'm standing, my feet are even wider still around the (non-)arch. So narrow-width shoes are too narrow behind the ball of my foot and cut into my feet, yet they're often still too loose around the toe to fit like a glove, as dance shoes ought to. Really, what I need is a shoe that's normal width, but has less of the top material, making for a "flatter" shoe. Unfortunately, they do not make shoes in varying flatnesses. :\

Despite all this, at the second dance shoe store I visited in my search, I found these:


And they were exactly what I was looking for, and best of all (and more importantly), by some strange miracle, they *fit perfectly*. And I didn't even have too much trouble dancing in the 2.8-inch heel, though it would've taken some getting used to to become really comfortable with it.

But it was not to be... after dancing in them a couple of times, once or twice for one hour, and then once for two or three, I couldn't feel my toes. At all. Except for this weird tingly sensation when I wiggled them just right. At first I kind of thought it was the cold (it was freezing out around this time), but no. A weekend went by, and still no feeling had returned. Then a week, then two. And then I just accepted that I no longer had feeling in my toes. I think it was a full two months later that I eventually realized I could feel my toes again.

Now, I liked these shoes so much that I was tempted to just wear them anyway and give up feeling my toes forever. But it was somewhere around this time that my teacher was starting to put more emphasis on proper technique... and apparently my feet are configured such that when I put my weight on the inside of the ball of my foot (as one must in Latin ballroom) while wearing heels over 2 inches, some bone in the ball of my foot is perfectly positioned to crush the hell out of some adjacent nerve, which... hurts. A lot.

So my search for dance shoes continued...