A long gap and a return to the milonga

The Counting House, Edinburgh

2021 was taken up with a huge amount of campaigning, trying to make the most of the money available from Sustrans' Spaces for People fund.  I posted about this and various issues related to the vexed topic of land access in Scotland on one of my other blogs, Perthshire and Beyond.  

During the first year of the pandemic with no vaccinations and great numbers of people becoming very ill and dying, once public transport started to open up again many people were nervous of taking it.  Bike sales soared.  These factors and the lower volumes of traffic meant there was both need and opportunity to implement temporary bikes lanes and more space for pedestrians and al fresco dining in towns.  The government made money available via Sustrans, the cycling charity.  I formed a group and over two years campaigned long and hard to try and effect these changes in Perth. But the political will in this Conservative administration was not there.  The council passed an application (which it made to itself - ask yourself about the democratic process of that) for a huge new road.  Even Perth's one promised bike lane, one mile long, which doesn't really go from anywhere useful to anywhere useful and is forecast to take years to build, has recently come under threat. So I gave up campaigning and contented myself with watching the strides made in other cities, particularly London. It's always easier to vote with your feet than to press for change, but moving house, especially once you have children settled and happy in school, is no easy undertaking.  

Last Sunday and last Tuesday in Edinburgh I went to my first milonga at The Counting House, home of of this milonga for about the last twenty years.  Apart from the unfortunate addition of the Six Nations flags on the wall, nothing much had changed.   Toby was still running things and on the door. The 'entrada' is still an astonishing £3. George, who used to run things and had been nearly as permanent a fixture as Toby in the milongas has apparently moved abroad.  Claudia, who used to play some good tandas, hasn't been seen for ages.  But Jessie was back, sometimes DJing apparently these days and Gustavo was still around. I am still not used to the slightly glitzier revamp of a few years but am not averse to it.  It takes most guys at least 7-10 years to become good dancers and by no means all of them do.  But I realised I have been on the scene a long time when I saw a guy who started dancing after me, 'already' (probably 7 years on) looking like he dances well.  

The music was, as expected deafening on Sunday from the DJ who reportedly has hearing problems.  My sympathy for any such affliction wears extremely thin when the hearing of others is or is threatened with similar permanent damage as a result.  Upon various requests, the volume improved though on Tuesday.  

I had not planned to dance but to take along a friend for chat and drinks and to see how things were at the milonga.  But there were enough good classic tandas to be able to dance quite a lot on Tuesday.  On that day I had grabbed my shoes at the last minute, still not really planning to dance.  But that gorgeous music rises up inside you and propels you to your feet.  When the music pulls you towards the floor it is a better indicator that it is danceable and great than anything else.  It is what mystifies me that so many British and European DJs play so many dud tracks.  Why play music that doesn't have that pull that has been felt by generations of dancers and which is why certain tracks are more popular than others? Don't they feel it?  

I guided my beginner friend, a man of 61. "Llevar" (carry) is so much the better word in Spanish for this activity.  But, as that verb suggests, it is hard work.  Guiding a beginner dancer by dancing with them is the hardest thing in the milonga, guiding a bloke in the woman's role, while nigh-on essential for them to learn good dancing is harder still.  Men just don't move like women.  The only men who move more smoothly than other men are gay or double role, male dancers. I can only think of one guy who danced so lightly it was like dancing with a woman.  This was a guy from the queer tango scene in Paris, which has some of the best dual role dancers.  When I wanted to swap back to traditional roles it made sense when I later discovered he only ever danced in the (traditional) woman's role.     

While dual role and male tango dancers from the queer tango scene dance better than most men, nearly all men are much heavier, more awkward and, on the whole, much less willing to "entregarse" (let go, give themselves to the partner and the dance) while not pushing their partner over.   As a woman, guiding a beginner man, especially an older man is by far the hardest thing I do in dance.  I have done it countless time, but no more! My right side, from my back to my knee were all destroyed by the end of the evening. They were worse the following day by which time my right wrist had joined the cacophony of physical complaint.  It was a challenging evening, but fun nonetheless and it was just lovely to hear the music, watch the dancing and be part of that social atmosphere.  

A friend talked later about "solo milongas" by which I understood he and his partner dance only together, with no one else in the same room, for perfectly understandable reasons to do with the pandemic.  But this for me is a contradiction in terms of what a milonga is, a necessarily social experience.  Dancing with only a partner, alone, in a room or a hall, however pleasant, is well, just that.  It's no milonga I can imagine nor have otherwise ever heard described.

But is it safe to dance in a real milonga? That depends on personal circumstances and your perception of what safe is and for whom.  Vaccinations reduce the likelihood of severe illness and death.  More controversially, but still, I believe, they reduce the likelihood that you will catch the disease, at least in the short term.   But yes the milongas are likely to be spreader events, of covid-19 just as they are of the common cold. Long before covid it was an unwritten rule that you shouldn't go to the milonga with a cold for that very reason.  

I didn't go anywhere during the pandemic, no cafes, no restaurants, no pubs, while there were no vaccinations and for a long time afterwards. This was partly because I had had a bad bout of covid in March 2020, possibly picked up in Spain at the end of February.  I had health problems after that and the whole experience shook me.  Primarily though it was to protect my parents.  But when dad started going out more than I was and the boys were back in school, things started to seem rather back to front.  In September I started attending a Spanish Higher class ('A'-level) in school.  The boys and my husband caught covid in August 2021, but I didn't.  Then my youngest caught it again in January 2022 and again I didn't.  Over the winter of 2021-22, unless you lived a hermit-like existence, and with children in school, we did not, you were almost inevitably bound to catch covid.   So I seem to have some immunity at least at the moment. 

The Edinburgh milonga requires for entry that your vaccinations are up to date as well as a lateral flow test done on the day.  I discovered recently that when you report your test to the government there is nothing clever built into this process or the test kit.  You part with a significant amount of personal data  - as one seems to do increasingly these days - but when you report your result there is no technical verification that the test is accurate. There is nothing at all to stop you lying about your result when you report it, making them useless really for attending events.  You might as well just ask people on the door whether they have tested negative that day and rely on good faith because that is what you are doing with LF test results. 

Furthermore, the tests themselves are known to be fairly inaccurate. A few months ago a GP told me that one of their patients tested negative ten days running using LF tests and then tested positive with a PCR test.  

We still only meet my folks outdoors and we all test beforehand.  I don't buy the fake news that LF tests are completely useless. My family has tested positive using them on numerous occasions.  However, I have also felt as though I was coming down with, or was fighting off, something very covid-like during and outside of the periods when my family tested positive and I tested negative.  It is for reasons such as these that we still only meet the folks outside, after testing and when we feel completely well.  

Berlin - practical information for travelling tango dancers

I went to Berlin in large part to explore the tango dance scene there and to find out where you can dance to good traditional tango music. This is part guide, part travelog.

Getting there: I found a flight through Skyscanner as I had a last minute opportunity to go away. I booked accommodation for seven nights through Airbnb which I've used for solo travel successfully several times before in Britain and abroad. That combination gave me the most flexibility on flights and where I wanted to stay and was about £100 cheaper than the cheapest package deal for those dates where there would have been less flexibility on accommodation type and location. I know from previous travel for tango dancing that getting back easily to your accommodation late at night is an important consideration!

You can get a shuttle train into the city from Schönefeld airport train station which is five minutes away outside the airport under a covered walkway.  You need to stamp your ticket on small, discreet machines for this purpose on the platform before travel.

Where to stay
I stayed in a  lovely warm, quiet apartment in the area called Mitte and found it an ideal base.  It was shared with two women I barely saw. As a poor sleeper arriving back late I valued the electric black-out shutters that are common in apartments on the Continent.  I was within a few blocks of Nou and Clärchens Ballhaus and within half an hour's walk of Roter Salon and El Ocaso, all milonga venues. The U6 and U8 Ubahn were nearby.  Both of these bisect the city north-south, making it easy to get to Tango Loft to the north (two stops on the U6) and to the other trad milongas, south, mostly in Kreuzberg. 

Mitte felt safe.  So did the little I saw of the area around Mehringdamm (Milonga Popular, Villa Kreuzberg and Walzerlinksgestricht). The area immediately around Kottbusser Tor subway (for Max and Moritz, Tangotanzen macht schön and Art 13) was  different in character but I really saw very little of it. It reminded me a bit of a mini Elephant and Castle near where I used to live in Southwark, London. I don't think it would be worth staying in that area for those milongas.  This map of Berlin (click to enlarge) is marked (by stars) with the trad milongas I went to or that I missed and would explore next time. It may help you decide where to stay.

Bikes: You might hire a bike if the forecast is good.   "Call a bike" was the system in operation on my street.  It works using your phone and unlock codes for the bike.  The terminal on the street had instructions in English. 

Berlin is flat but cold and can be quite windy in February.  Some people will cycle on pavements and not a hoodie on a stunt bike as I often see in the UK.  In Germany, where I have found the sense of civic coherence to be strong, this surprised me.  A very courteous Austrian dancer living in Berlin told me the city had fared badly in a recent survey of bike-friendly cities. I said I had not seen the separate cycle pavements I remembered from my childhood in northern Germany. "That's because we are in the east side of Berlin", he said. Here they didn't plan for bike paths during rebuilding as they did in the west and so they have been incorporating them into the road system only in the last few years. When I arrived I didn’t have a sense of the size of city and the forecast was mixed so I decided to use public transport but a bike is handy to get back from milongas reasonably safely & quickly.

Public transport  - Berlin has a fantastic, fast, efficient, regular and ubiquitous public transport system.  There are also overland trains (S-Bahn).  Midweek and on Sunday I couldn’t get a U-bahn (underground train) after around 0030 so was reliant on nightbuses. But on Friday and Saturday the subway and the metropolitan S-Bahn run through the night.  Berlin has trams, too, the M version of which also runs all night including during the week.  I liked that the subway is not anything like as vertiginously or suffocatingly deep as in London.

You can get multi-day, multi transport-tickets at the airport and at self service machines on platforms. The multi-day tickets can cover all kinds of transport.  I recommend it for hassle free travel. You can also get individual travel tickets for  E2.70 for inner Berlin.  I could not pay for a single journey using debit card in the ticket machines so you may need change.  You can get a combined museum & transport ticket for I think not much more than the multi transport ticket. I know you can get them at the airport. Note, the ticket tells you to validate (stamp with platform machine) before travel.

I got around very well using Google maps public transport system for Berlin. Some Berliners use a public transport app but I didn't need it.

On my first night after the milonga at about 0045 I realised I'd missed the U-bahn but simply could not find a bus stop by Milonga Popular. Bus stops do not always have shelters. Eventually I found it  Sometimes they just look like this (H for Haltestelle - bus stop):

Cashpoints - In the confusion of leaving Villa Kreuzberg on Thursday I forgot to go to a cashpoint before reaching Wedding, one of the transport stops for Tango Loft. There is a Commerzbank and a Sparkasse near Wedding. I had had no problem using the exteral ATMs in Mitte but the machines at the first bank now didn't like my card & I couldn't get inside the door to the machines in the other bank. I understand now that some ATMs inside bank foyers in Germany are closed from 10pm till morning.  In my case though I had just seen a man leave so it was very possibly user error! I had just enough cash to get in but make sure you have enough with you when you leave the centre.

General

Berliners dont jaywalk with anything like London insouciance. Right of way rules here.  Each has his proper turn and his alloted slot. For a people I don't remember being great queuers I find this puzzling. But if you watch film footage of early Berlin in the Story of Berlin museum, law-abiding pedestrians aren't at all in evidence!

I liked that it is built into the traffic system that vehicles turning the corner coincide with the signal for pedestrians to cross the road. It establishes the right balance between vehicles and pedestrians which I think is falling away in Britain.

On the other hand, you will find few zebra crossings in Berlin and from the time when I learned to drive in Germany I remember almost no roundabouts.  Perhaps these  traffic features, reliant on human judgment, are unsuited to the cultural temperament here which seems to prefer the more unambiguous electro-mechanical systems.

Do not stand on the yellow line by the doors on a crowded bus, even though the doors don't open inwards.  The bus won't go,  the driver will say something stern over the loudspeaker & everyone will stare!  On the other hand when I thought I'd missed the subway train there was a platform announcement which I belatedly realised said something like "Does the lady on the platform want to get on?" In which case everyone will laugh... :)

Take a phone charger & adapter in your bag for when you stay out later than planned and run out of charge at 3AM when you're figuring out how to get home...

Expect bars (but not restaurants or milongas) to be smoky.

Ladies - it is stating the obvious but bears reiterating - pack very comfortable daytime shoes if you want to stay the course.

Safety

This is mainly intended for women like me who are visiting alone. Berlin generally did feel, and I was told is, a fairly safe city.  I did not really have problems walking late at night which is to say between 0100 and 0400. In fact the first two days I reluctantly asked at least four random guys on the street for information or directions at 0100 or later & they couldn't have been more helpful. But I was also hustled and bumped by a random, obviously crazy guy in the fairly busy, very public Kulturbrauerai area around 2030 and kerb-crawled by a crowd of guys in a car at 0330 a few hundred meters from where I was staying which was surprising - you just never know.  It isn't that fun walking alone at that time but there were cars and people around on the streets though I don't think I saw another solo female about at that time. A bike might at least feel safer.

On the way to Tango Loft I walked down Lindowerstr from Wedding public transport station.  It is dark with guys hanging about and I did not choose to do so again.  Instead I got off at Reinickendorfe Strasse instead and walked down the street of the same name, bigger, busier & more brightly lit, until Gerichtstrasse (for Tango Loft).  Going home you can get a night bus into Mitte and beyond by Reinickendorfer Strasse subway. I was accompanied twice to public transport in the early hours, once very late/early from Tango Loft, for which I was grateful.

Milonga Popular & Tango Loft are both down dark alleys. If I hadn't met people coming the other way to ask I would've hesitated to go down them alone especially as I wasn't sure I was in the right place. If going alone and for the first time see the photos on my individual milonga reviews (forthcoming) to help you identify them.

I saw quite a lot of random drinking in the street right across the city - mostly young people with beer bottles but nothing that was particularly out of hand and nothing compared to what you will see any weekend night in many British city centres.

Many thanks to Sven Froese for clarifications about transport and banks.