Salsa in Cali

I got to Cali, what Colombians call "the salsa capital of the world," all bright-eyes and bushy-tailed, super excited to make up for only dancing a maximum of once a week for the last year and a half.

I spent my first few hours with Angie, my couch surfing host and a girl who is the same person as me but 10 years younger. We became besties the moment I got to her house. I put my bags down and we started talking and kept going right on through as we ate breakfast and lunch together before she had to go to class.

Our first day out to lunch

I had already deemed her the same person as me when I read her CS profile but, in person, I found the similarities almost hilariously overboard. Even the types of notes and goals she writes for herself and posts around her room are literally things I've written to myself before. Crazy.

I spent the first few days settling in and looking for a volunteer job at a hostel. I walked around door to door, knocking at every hostel in San Antonio (the most beautiful part of the city and where all the hostels are), asking for volunteer work. A few places accepted me and I ended up moving into a hostel that is also a Vegan Food restaurant.

My job was to clean "5 hours a day" although I think I only actually worked a total of two hours in the four days I lived there. Likewise, though, I'd been promised (what I thought would be an awesome) three meals a day and actually barely received anything more than rice for the most part when I asked for food. I spent five hours per day in the hostel, though, just in case I was needed and didn't feel the exchange was very worth it...or very much fun.

The hostel was super pretty, though :)

I wrote Angie, who lives with two other friends, again and asked if I could pay something small and come back to live with them a little longer. It had been so much more fun and I wanted to be able to spend more time with my new friend! She and the girls offered to let me stay for a verrrry small amount and I helped them a bit with cleaning and their English! It was perfect and we had a great two weeks together!

Two of the girls I stayed with <3

 As I got more settled in, I started to go out more but the beginning of my salsa adventure was a total failure. All I wanted to do was dance but I'd get to a club and the Caleños (people from Cali) would see my gringa face and pass right by me. No one wanted to dance with me. At the verrrry end of each of the nights I went out, someone would finally (presumably) run out of options or get bored or something and ask me to dance. Luckily, one of these times it was an amazing salsa teacher named Carlos.

Side note: no joke...each of the times someone danced with me, the conversation literally went like this:
Caleño: Where are you from?
Me: The U.S.
Caleño: But you can dance.

"But." lol

A couple days later, Carlos invited me to come be his "assistant" at the salsa classes he teaches in a couple of hostels. (Bonus: there were Brazilians in both classes so I got to speak Portuguese, too!) I'm no Caleñan salsa dancer, but if I'm teaching gringos at hostels, that apparently doesn't matter. (Flashback to that time I got paid to teach bachata lessons at my hostel in Peru...How does this keep happening?!)

Giving the classes, I also met John, Carlos's other assistant. John is an amazing dancer and I started seeing him every time I went out after that. We danced together a bunch and, no joke, once people saw me dance with him, everyyyyone started asking me to dance! I didn't sit out for another song the entire time I was in Cali. I guess someone they trusted had to accept me first? It was dumb but, once I was finally dancing, I didn't care anymore.

Out dancing in Cali!

I spent the next couple of weeks learning about Cali's unique salsa culture. It was actually quite different from everywhere else I've ever danced. The differences?

1. Tennis shoes instead of salsa shoes
Only at one place do some people wear salsa shoes but the rest wear gym shoes. I wore my soccer shoes (until I played a game and busted them wide open and had to go back to my heels).

 2. No eye-contact/smiling
Okay, some is alright...but apparently here if you look at your dance partner and smile too much (which is the polite thing to do in every other salsa community I've been a part of), they take that as flirting and think you're up to something else. This was particularly difficult for me so there was a bit of confusion between some of my dance partners and I.

3. Couples dance with each other...
...often exclusively. Everywhere else I've been, you dance with your partner a bunch, sure, but also with other people. Here, if I went out with a guy friend, people assumed we were a couple and therefore didn't ask me to dance. (Don't worry--only made that mistake once!)

4. It's all about the feet!
I knew this ahead of time but it's even more extreme than I thought. I ended up taking classes during my last week in Cali and saw the behind-the-scenes. They focus almost exclusively on footwork which means everyone is able to switch between these crazy-fast footwork patterns with ease but, at the same time, most people don't know the simplest of turn patterns.

Liliana, another amazing friend I got to make through couchsurfing (for the weekend that Angie's parents, who don't know she hosts surfers, came to stay), took me to a Kizomba class that turned out to be one of my favorite parts of Cali! Every Sunday there is a class that costs just over $1.00 and the teacher is great!

Liliana & I

At the end of the class, there's a salsa/bachata/kizomba social which is pretty much my dream come true. The funny thing, too, was that I, again, ended up teaching the others some Dominican-style bachata because the only type people know here is modern. It was really fun that they were willing to learn!

Three weeks in Cali was, overall, a great idea and I could easily stay more time. Anywhere there's such amazing music, friendly people and so many opportunities to dance, I really can't complain. Cali, I'll be back as soon as I can!