Flamenco Finds

May 23, 2023

    My morning (aka 1300 hr) started off exhausting. I didn’t want to get out of bed, but because we had class at 1400, I needed to get moving. In class, I noticed something quite different than the United States. No one could find the exclamation mark on the keyboard. This may not seem like much of an issue, but it was a needed character to login to do presentations. This actually cost us a lot of time simply overcoming this obstacle of the missing “exclamation” key. Of course, we found a solution, and listened to 2 presentations. Later that day, we had Flamenco dancing lessons. I was initially super nervous because I am an awful dancer. Our poor instructor was late because she just found out about the death of a family member. Although she had this unfortunate event, she showed up ready to teach. The pain was easy to view in her eyes, but as she began to dance, I could see the stress of her outside life begin to fade momentarily. I could tell that dancing was her escape to the outside world, and she came to teach us these lessons to momentarily forget about her outside sorrows. This was very inspiring that she had the passion and drive to show up even through a death. As learned in the earlier presentation about Flamenco, it is a dance used to express emotions. I see this as a way to leave the outside world while dancing in the studio. I really loved the dance class, but I left with more than Flamenco lessons. I left with the desire to find a passion that allows me to temporarily escape the real world, just like our instructor’s passion for flamenco.

The Flamenco dancing class ended up being one of my
favorite activities on the trip. Above is us doing the choreography 
our instructor taught us!