Kick Off To The New Year.

A break from dancing showed me how hard work dancing can actually be. I was planning on going to a Salsa party last Friday evening but I simply had to listen to my tired body and skip it. It has been a while since I have been that exhausted: I came home and couldn't do anything else than lie in my bed. When I was dancing every day I never got this feeling, which might not be the best thing. From now on I have to let my body rest better than that.

This year's dancing started with Mr A. on Wednesday. I could really feel the dance break in all of my moves and following. It is scary how fast you can go out of shape! This time we actually concentrated on something and danced mostly Slow Waltz, Cha-cha and Rumba. Since videotaping my zoukking has been a great way of improving I wanted to see how my standard stance and stepping looks like in a video. Fortunately it didn't look that bad, and it didn't even give me that kind of shock I got from my first Zouk video. We ended our practice with pretty intensive Rumba (by this time we had attracted some audience from people coming to a common practice, so of course we had to give them a small show!).

On Thursday evening I wended my way to this year's first ballroom dance party to Otaniemi where some of HOT Dance's dancers had organized a dance floor, sauna, music and some food for the rest of us. It was the perfect timing for this kind of party: the dance classes haven't started yet and many (including me) had this week free from studies and work. It is always a sign of a good party if I end up dancing five hours without noticing the time pass by! It was a good thing that I happened to practice Bugg lately with Mr A., because the playlist was quite concentrated on Bugg, Fusku and fast Foxtrot, and I am finally getting to feel comfortable dancing these dances, yay! Here is some pictures from the party (thanks dad for the new camera by the way!):

I had practices with Michaelo on Friday and Saturday and we did something pretty cool: we made our first own figure! In addition, we went through a figure from Mr Dragon. We have been taking videos in almost every practice now and they show that we both have improved so much lately. After Saturday's practice we headed to HSA's 1st Anniversary party to HSA's dance studio and continued dancing Zouk there. There were some beautiful dance shows in the party and lots of good Salsa dancers, but unfortunately not enough leaders. Somehow I just didn't enjoy the Salsa party that much so I ended up dancing with Michaelo most of the evening (a thing that other zoukkers didn't seem to appreciate; well, I don't blame them, I would have been pissed off too if someone occupied him all the time!).

My first dance week ended to Sunday evening practice with JV. We did some leading/following exercises which I found pretty useful especially after dancing a lot with Michaelo. What I have learned is that it is good to dance with different kind of dancers, so I am lucky to have three practice partners who all have really different styles.

My January is going to be busy busy busy with my new job and university studies so I might not update this blog every week. You know, I would rather spend my time dancing than writing about it if I have to choose between those two!

Last but not least, here is some pictures from my dancer friend's birthday party from Monday. See, we dancers do other things together than just dance (like talk about dancing, watch dance videos and talk about those and... well, that's about it).