Dancing in Lapland.

Last Tuesday me and Nic came to Lapland to spend the Easter holidays with my family. We are staying in a cozy cottage near Levi skiing center. Since I did not want to skip our Wednesday's dancing practice I decided to take Nic to Finnish "lavatanssit", a dance evening with Finnish music and lots of old people dancing dances like Humppa, Jenkka, Waltz, Finnish Tango, Foxtrot etc. There was quite famous dance music orchestra called Souvarit playing in Levi hotel yesterday evening so I figured that would be a perfect chance to teach Nic something about Finnish culture and maybe to learn some new dances myself.

I have been in a dance evening like that before couple of times but I never would have imagined that I could have had so much fun there as I did last night. We were definitely the youngest people there but the age doesn't really matter if everybody is having fun dancing together. Nic said he was quite surprised about everybody's dancing skills and the variety of styles you could see there. It seemed everybody were dancing in their own way and style so trying to catch the basic steps for the dances was more difficult that I would have thought. We were having big laughs trying to dance some Jenkka after observing how the steps would go. At least we were having fun!

I also learned the basic steps to Foxtrot: right, left, sidestep. I think after a while I was actually doing quite fine even though Nic never stays with the basic steps: once I get the hang of them theres more to come. I also dances the weirdest Rumba since far. It just felt wrong to dance Rumba to melancholic Finnish dance music! I did not get the rumba feeling at all. Quite a different experience I must say!

That night there was a womens and mens turm.

We also a short small dancing practice in the cottage earlier that day. I have a feeling that I am getting the idea of how to move my hands in Rumba. Nic said to me today that he was happy to see that I already adapted some of the new movement when we were dancing last night. And I did not even try to do that! I was so pleased to hear that because I have been so insecure especially about the hands when dancing Rumba. I also really like practicing the hand movements (especially if my legs are sore from dancing!).

My calves are so sore from snow boarding the whole day today but I am hoping we could have a dance practice tomorrow evening after some sunny slopes in Levi.