A Short Letter Home

But at night it's a different world

We managed to go out dancing last night and saw an unusual sight. There was a woman dancing outside of the circle and dancing quite well. She was totally ignoring the "official" moves and just doing her own thing. Most of the folks hanging on the outskirts are either clumsily trying to learn the steps everyone else is doing or are under six years of age.

But that's not what I wanted to write about. What I wanted to mention is our own breaking of the status quo last weekend. We've fallen into a dreadful rut. We usually eat supper and then, if we don't have English corner, a Chinese lesson or go dancing, we all sit around the apartment and vegetate. It's a bad habit, born from the need to squeeze four showers into the evening window of hot water. But last Sunday, however, we did something different. We had heard, months ago now, that there was another group of street dancers over on the east side of town by the Well Supermarket. Yau Neih had been thinking about taking an evening walk to seek them out some night and when we weren't able to do our grocery shopping that morning, we decided to do an evening shop at the Well.

After dinner we grabbed the backpack and headed down the old familiar trail. The first surprise came as we walked past the park where we usually go dancing. We saw our group and the attendant spectators as we walked past on the opposite side of the street. But then, also in the park, we saw another circle in progress. Amazing what goes on right around the corner when you're not paying attention. Now there was an alternate dance circle going on back when our group was dancing at the crossroads, but that seemed to be a bunch of guys doing either a very ethnic or very drunken dance. This one seemed to be a bit more sedate. Anyway, we had shopping to do and decided not to cross the street and investigate further.

The last block before the supermarket is one lined with small shops. At night, however, the sidewalk is transformed to a food court as small barbecue stands set up. We made our way through them, resisting the temptation to get a stick of roasted man tao. We got to the corner of Shi Ji and Nan Tian and, sure enough, there was a circle of dancers on the sidewalk, kitty corner from the supermarket. We crossed over and watched them for a few numbers. The group was about half the size of our group, though they were playing the same songs. They also sported I.D. tags, which didn't look quite as cool as ours. (It's hard to top faux leather.) The odd thing was that we saw yet another group down the street. Between songs, we could hear that this latest group was also playing the same music. We ambled over and found that their circle was quite small, maybe thirty people at most. This group weren't tagged and didn't seem to have anyone leading the dancing. We had to wonder if they had splintered off from the other group, refusing to buy name tags.

Well, after a while we decided that we really should buy our groceries. We took care of business and headed home, swinging by the park. We stopped to watch the second circle that we had seen earlier. This group also was dancing sans tags. There was a group of five women dancing in the middle and a group of thirty or forty dancing in an outer circle. None of the songs we heard were familiar, though the steps were pretty much the same used by the other three groups. Anyway, after a few numbers, we headed home, wondering what the story was behind all these groups. We also learned a lesson: that if we stay indoors after dark, we miss a whole 'nother side of life here.

posted by John @ 6:57 AM