All Balboa Weekend 2007 Diary - Part 1

Hey there again. Here's my story from yesterday (Friday) at All Bal weekend.


So after getting in at 1:15 am or so from the actually fun car ride with Rob and Elaina (I say actually enjoyable not becasue of anything about R&E but rather because 6-7 hour drives are not often described as fun.) I crashed out and woke up Friday morning at 7:30ish.

After I showered, Mike and I headed down to breakfast, where Rob, Elaina, Amy and Tim were already eating. Their booth wasn't big enough for more people so we had to wait for our own table. We waited. Then we waited some more. Then some more. .... you get the idea. All the time, BTW there were dozens of empty tables. They just wouldn't let people sit down. It was a buffet, so the reasons for this are unclear. Suffice to say that the hotel restaurant has been the major lowlight of the trip. Anyway eventaull y we paid a ludicrous amount of money for a pretty crappy breakfast buffet.

Onto classes!

Class one was with a french couple named Bernard and Anne-Helene. They kept asking if we understood their "Fraglish" as they called it, but they were perfectly good English speakers. Far better than any of our French, I'm sure. Anyway the class was pretty well distributed. There were only about 4 more leads than follows, and in a class of over 40 people, that's not so bad at all. They went over one of the two Balboa basic steps. It was a little odd, since they taught the one that most people learn second, but it was just fine. It was good practice for my form. They then taught some scoots, which are neat little ad-lib steps where you slide sideways. I'd learned these before, but they really helped me with my transitions in and out of them. Overall, it was a great, fun class.

After class one we had an hour break. I browsed the shop for Bal merchendise, and got a few shirts. They're neat looking. One is an eggplant colored polo with silhouettes of all the instructors dancing on them. The other is a jersey type T-shirt with All Balboa Weekend written on it. Good times.

Class two was awsome! It was taught by Nick Williams, a great dance champion and Sylvia Sikes! (The name Sylvia Sykes! must always be followed by an excalmation point, as explained in the next sentend.) Sylvia! is basically the reason everyone dances Bal. She learned from the original dancers, and broke it down and brought it to modern swing ballrooms. She's an absolutely amazing dancer and a crystal clear instructor. Summer, one of the founders of Charm City Swing, learned from her. Anyway, we went over the other basic (step, step, hold, step) and the come-around, which is the move that gets you into and out of half the other moves in Balboa. Again it was stuff that I'd learned before, but after this class, I felt like I owned these moves. It was absolutely great for my form and for my confidence.

We then broke for lunch.

This is where the hotel restaurant story gets even more absurd. So Rob, Elaina, Yasmina and I decide to go get lunch in the hotel restaurant. Anyway, we put in our order and waited. And waited. Now we had like an hour until the next classes, so we weren't too worried, but then after we went another 30 minutes without so much as seeing a waiter, I got concerned, walked out to get someone and asked about our food. After 10 minutes of wandering around aimlessly, the waiter went back to the kitchen and returned with 20 minutes to lesson time to tell us that they had lost our food ticket and were just putting the food in now. I of course told him that I need to be dancing in 20 minutes and had no desire to wolf down a personal pizza and then try to dance. They handed me some complementary greasy breadsticks and I left. The rest were in tracks that didn't have a class right after lunch, so they stayed to get their food. There were aparently more screw ups, but I wasn't around for them, so I won't report. Suffice to say, we won't be eating there again.

End of part 1. I'm off to my next class. More rundown afterward! Woot woot!

-Ian