I went to my last salsa class. I gave a gift to the instructors because they are teaching for their love of dance. They have full time jobs and this is something they do on the side for free. I like this idea of having a side project/ hobby, I think I have something in mind that I will do when I move back to LA (which I will post about later). This is another one of my families in Oman who I have gotten to know more recently. One of my best friend’s told me it takes about 1 to 1.5 years to really to to know people and start enjoying the city, and I felt that this is true in my case as well because I have just gotten to know and feel comfortable with my friends where we are doings things outside out regular meet up timings.
This is only a picture of the intermediate group, there are 2 other levels of people who are apart of the Latin dance muscat group. I think it comes to about 50 people who are taking lessons on a Saturday night throughout all levels.
This is a hobby that I will continue to learn. But I won’t have my dance partner Aya with me 😦 hopefully I will get good while I am back in LA then when the next time we meet up and dance she will be shocked on all the new moves and leading skills. I am still much a beginner and I don’t practice that much so the moves are still not natural and fluid, but looks good enough to see that I have taken a few dance lessons. Hahaha
I have learned that uncomfortable experiences will eventually become comfortable and fun experiences. It helps that I have a hot girlfriend who likes to dance so she makes me look good. Haha, at least that is what I tell her. My confidence level has risen and I feel as if I am starting to care less about how people perceive me because I know at the end of the day why I am doing this and what is important to me. At the beginning I was self conscious of how I was moving but after a while I thought we beginners are all in the same boat, yes some may pick up skills faster than others but we all made an initial commitment to try something new and out of our comfort zone. Think about putting Albert Einstein into Mozarts shoes of playing piano, we can’t expect to pick up a thought process, skills, technique just like that. What we can do is put in effort and learn from a good mentor and group. The group plays an important part of learning more outside of the class like dance parties and practices which creates this safe and comfortable environment to teach and learn new skills. There was one latin circle dance we did called La Rueda and me and Aya could not learn it in the class because we kept on missing classes. But we had a dance session and dinner with 4 others and we danced for like 4 hrs practicing La Rueda moves and by the end of the night we would be able to join the class and pick up the moves.
2 big takes aways from learning salsa
– when a new opportunity comes up and it seems uncomfortable take it head on with a positive attitude that this is a learning experience and change is okay
– create a social group if I want to fine tune skills as wells as learn new ones. This will give me the chance to me a mentor/ student for skills that I may or may not know. At the end of the day we are all helping each other out.
Another good bye…..
#learning#Salsa#family
Kwong Adventure 