And just like that I’m back at my desk – it feels impossible that reality and everyday life still exists. Colombia was absolutely the trip of a lifetime and ever since we started the journey home I’ve been trying to work out why so that I could articulate it here. I think it’s because it was so much a road untravelled. For most of it there just wasn’t a tourist path and so we were immersed into everyday life there, rubbing along with local people and that made it feel vibrant and true. The fact that we’d organised our travels independently added to the feeling of really being alive, we had to make our own way through each day and it was very much a trip and not a holiday. For me a holiday is ranked on how many books I manage to read and I succeeded in a total of five pages in Colombia. That’s because my mind was so full of new experiences that it took all of my headspace just to process them. Today I’m going to talk about Medellin – a week of salsa and culture. As you can imagine I’m time-pressed this week as well as jet-lagged and I’m also feeling sorry for myself after an emergency tooth extraction so I’m going to let video do the talking for some of this post. There’s so much to say and of course there’s our dancing story to tell you that it’s just going to work better as more of a vlog than a blog. So let’s go – Medellin – a week of salsa and culture.
Medellin – a week of salsa and culture
Medellin Saturday – arrival
Here I was as we arrived in Medellin, grinning with delight at being able to wear a t-shirt after leaving the much cooler temperatures of Bogotá behind. Medellin is known as the city of eternal spring, temperatures stay at around 22°C all year round and the weather isn’t the only contrast to Bogotá. As we drove from the airport we were blown away by how green and tropical it is but also how modern and clean. It’s a city that for reasons I’ll go into later has been completely rebuilt so it was very different to Colombia’s shabby, gritty capital that still lingers in its past.
Our whole trip to Colombia was centred around this week in Medellin. As I’ve said before I get quite a few offers of press trips now but I don’t have time to take most of them. But when an invitation from Somoloco, a small salsa school in Medellin dropped into my inbox last year I knew immediately that it was one I couldn’t miss. Despite it involving a significant personal outlay it felt like an adventure that would thrill us both, an opportunity that we just had to seize with both hands. And just a quick transparency reminder – we were invited to spend a week at the Somoloco salsa school in return for covering our experience on Instagram. We paid for everything else – flights, food, experiences and the rest of our trip ourselves.
Wearing: Boden t-shirt and belt (past season); jeans; trainers
Salsa school didn’t start until Monday so we had the rest of the weekend to find our way around Medellin. My joy in the warmer weather didn’t last long, as we headed out for dinner the most spectacular thunderstorm broke around us with hours of torrential rain. So like true Brits abroad we sat alone on the restaurant’s terrace, still appreciating the warmth while marvelling at the tropical downpour.
Medellin Sunday – Comuna 13
As you’ll know, back in the 1980s and 90s Medellin was the most dangerous city in the world. During the late 1970s the demand for cocaine in the US increased exponentially and Colombian smugglers who had already established trading routes to bring heavily taxed American spirits and tobacco into Colombia quickly realised that they could use their network to send cocaine in the other direction. Cartels were established and as always, wherever there is greed for money and power, warfare broke out.
Sitting on the slopes of the Andes, way above the centre of the modern city, Comuna 13 was one of the poorest areas in Medellin, ripe for the recruitment of gang workers.
It’s the landscape that you see in the TV dramas about the drug wars but since Colombia put an end to the cartels in the late 90s/early 2000s, it’s become the perfect case study for social regeneration. The buildings are still shanty style but the district is clean and well kept, people who live in the wealthier districts in Medellin are taxed to support their poorer neighbours and the energy companies underpin the infrastructure with cheap energy and social sponsorship.
Perhaps the most impactful investment though has been in the cable cars and escalators (yes really – see below) that have been installed all the way up the mountainside. They’ve enabled the people who were geographically isolated to take jobs in the city centre and commute there easily.
The young who were once prime targets for the drug gangs can now support themselves through socially sponsored creative outlets, such as dance…
… or street art – which is spectacular. I chose this one to show you because it illustrates the Colombians’ move away from colonial Catholicism, back towards their indigenous beliefs which focus on the Andean ‘Pachamama’ who we would most closely relate to Mother Earth. However the triangle represents the Christian trinity, signifying that they’re happy to live in harmony with those who continue to practice the Catholic faith.
We learned so much that day about hope, pride, perseverance and recovery… about how government, industry and community can work together to build something optimistic and new. I wish I had time to tell you more – I could write a book about this trip. It was such a privilege to end the afternoon in a bar at the very top of the commune sitting amongst the friendly locals who were dancing salsa. When we’re surrounded by bad news, as we all are at the moment, it was soul restoring to visit a place that’s been through the very worst that life could possibly throw at it – and made its way through to a hopeful new future.
Medellin Monday – Somoloco Dance School
On Monday we awoke with mixed feelings of nerves and excitement, it was literally that first day of term feeling because we were due to start an intensive week of salsa immersion at the Somoloco dance school. Before I go on to tell you about how it went I just want to talk a little bit about Somoloco because it’s a special find – it isn’t often that you come across something like this that caters so warmly for all ages and abilities. Somoloco is run by the very charismatic New Yorker David who started his career in health tech, founding innovative start-up companies and rubbing shoulders with people like Bill Gates. However despite being very successful financially, he found himself reaching burnout; somehow the goals that he’d thought mattered so much just didn’t have meaning. And then he found salsa. I did a series of interviews with his and here’s a clip explaining his ‘why’ in his own words.
So the whole purpose of Somoloco is about so much more than just salsa, it’s designed to bring joy into the lives of anyone who is looking for it. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a complete beginner or a pro dancer, the teachers will work closely with you. They’re all locals so as well as teaching you the steps they’re there to immerse you in the culture, helping you to really feel the music as well as understand why salsa is so important to them – in a country that has faced so much horror it’s a joyful release that people grab onto daily. Everybody dances salsa, however young or old they are, it’s a dance of hope, passion and optimism. The word that everyone there uses all of the time to describe what it brings to your life is ‘sabor’ which translates literally as ‘flavour’ but I’d interpret it more as ‘zest’… and even that doesn’t quite encapsulate the intensity of what the Colombians are trying to get across.
Of course you can learn salsa in community centres anywhere but the whole point of the immersion is that salsa is about much more than just knowing the steps. It’s about immersing yourself in everything that surrounds it as David articulates here.
We’ve had this trip on the horizon since last summer but I made a deliberate decision not to prepare for it. We could have taken salsa lessons locally to establish a few basic moves but I felt that it wouldn’t be right. There’s nothing more annoying than watching someone on Instagram who claims to be a beginner at something like ski-ing then glide down the slopes, finally admitting that they’ve been practicing on a dry ski slope for months before they left. I wanted to do this with an ‘everyman’ feel, to show you that anyone can get what we did from an immersive course like this.
Of course we were going with the quiet confidence that we dance together a lot – we spend at least one in every three weekends dancing disco so, we reasoned, surely we’d pick it up quickly. But it was immediately much harder than we ever imagined and later on in the trip a teacher explained that the fact that we already dance was the reason why. She explained that it’s much harder for anyone who regularly dances to the European/US four beat tempo to adjust to three – it’s a bit like learning to write with your other hand. Most people who go on salsa courses as beginners haven’t danced for years and so are starting afresh. So here we were on our very first day just trying to get used to the counting which instead of our usual 1,2,3,4 went 1,2,3 stop, 5,6,7 stop – the focus on our faces makes me smile! Here we are in action just trying to drill it into our feet.
At the end of the first three hour session we were both slightly stunned by how little progress we’d made. We hadn’t met the rest of our group properly at this stage but seeing them dancing around us with their teachers showed that they were nearly all much more advanced than us. I think we’d have left feeling very downhearted if our teacher Kata hadn’t picked up on it and given us a little pep talk at the end as well as a hug. She could see how hard we were trying and how frustrated we felt.
That evening Somoloco took the whole group out to a traditional Colombian restaurant so that we could get to know each other. As you can see we were a mixed bunch – different ages, nationalities and abilities. Six of the women there were were solo travellers, two of them midlifers. There was a midlife man who was there on his own too. I can’t share much of their stories but I’ll call them resetters, they were starting new chapters in their lives and had come to the salsa school to find joy and connection. Then there were the gap year travellers, single and in their 30s, taking a career break before thinking about settling down. Both the resetters and the gap year travellers had come for the social side of salsa, the fun of dancing with lots of different people and learning from them along the way. Lastly there were the empty nesters – four couples including us who had come for reconnection. We were all there less for the social side and more for the sensual aspect of being close and doing something new with the person that we’ve loved and lived with for so long.
Medellin Tuesday – Somoloco Dance School
We had a full day of school on the Tuesday. It started with a musicality class, specifically because salsa music is quite hard to penetrate and you have to be able to identify the ‘one’ beat before you begin to dance. When you go out into the clubs in Colombia it gets even more difficult because they hand out all kinds of instruments such as cow bells, maracas and claves for anyone who’s standing on the sides to play along with. They hit them on the offbeats and as they do, the musicians start to jam with them and the rhythm changes – so if you’re just counting your steps in a 123/567 you get lost. You have to be able to adapt as they do – it’s so much harder than dancing salsa to a standard prerecorded track. Anyway we all worked with different instruments in this class and I really enjoyed the drumming part they gave me here because it was back in a classic 1234 – just to add confusion to my dancing later!
The second half of the morning was a group class purely about rhythm and the moves were much more along the lines of our usual disco so we were in our comfort zone.
That afternoon we were back at the dance school for perhaps the most seismic few hours of the course – and our relationship. You see we had to start dancing together and in order to do that I had to submit to Mal’s lead. That just isn’t how our relationship works. At all!
Kata instructed Mal to be firm with me when he felt me trying to take over (you can hear him telling me off here). And she told me not to move unless I could feel his clear instructions – even if I felt they weren’t right I had to follow him. So I went to the loo and had a strong word with myself, it literally was a moment of complete flux. Here are my first few moments of letting him take over.
The seismic bit was that as I grew more used to it, I realised how many walls I still had standing from my first unhappy marriage when I built defences to protect myself. I suddenly saw that despite 27 happy and trusting years spent with Mal, I’d never completely let the walls fall. Letting myself go like this by placing myself in his hands healed something at a very tender level. Somehow my body finally recognised what my mind has known for a long time, that Mal isn’t going to smash me and leave me broken as my first husband did. Who’d have thought that dancing could teach you that?
The final lesson that afternoon was in Cali salsa with its signature kicking steps – and by now we felt we were getting somewhere. The joy was starting to flow in!
Medellin Wednesday – Somoloco Dance School
On Wednesday we had the morning off and after five hours of solid dancing the day before it might have been a good idea to chill out but others in the group were going on a walking tour of the city so we decided to join them. I’m so glad we did. You see Medellin is impressive in its newness and positivity but we were finding it hard to get under its skin. I was particularly keen to understand where the people’s feelings about Pablo Escobar were sitting now, 30 years after his death. The problem was that we’d been advised that it was better not to mention him because people still react quite strongly either for or against him. So it was hard to know what to think until we went on what was probably the best contextual history tour I’ve ever experienced. Very few things make me cry but this man and his storytelling did – it’s far more impactful in video than it ever can be in writing so just watch and you’ll learn everything you need to know to have a considered opinion.
This very personal history is quite hard to hear but it’s testimony to how bad things were here once – how fortunate for Medellin that this is now in the past. We all need to learn from atrocity although it seems that right now some haven’t and that people with too much power will continue to inflict cruelty closer to our own shores.
This next part is even more painful but I think we have a duty to listen to difficult things and take them as warnings. They show just how complicit the governing powers that we expect to protect us can become.
I’m so glad we went on that tour, it was enriching not only from a historical but also a political perspective. And I was also glad to have an afternoon of dancing ahead so that I could move on… without forgetting. You can see we were tired though, we’d woken up with aching legs, walked for three hours and then shuffled into our three hour class. We learned new steps but they didn’t have a lot of spring in them.
And then straight afterwards we jumped into taxis for a visit to Colombia’s national salsa station where they suddenly decided to interview me live on air… in Spanish. It was one of those terrifying moments that I’d usually shrink away from but… there was something about the dancing that was making me feel braver than usual. I had a ‘what the heck’ moment that was all wrapped up in the languages degree that I’ve never used. This trip was bringing out frustration about that. Even in English I’d have spluttered and stuttered so I think I did ok, even if it was just in understanding the questions – the DJ had quite a heavy Medellin accent so I was relieved that I managed to pick up what he was saying. Here’s a little clip for anyone who’s interested – you can feel the nerves bouncing off me even if you don’t speak Spanish!
After a quick change (and a lot of deep breaths) we then headed out to catch up with David in the beautiful old neighbourhood of Envigado which is as traditionally Colombian as it gets. Again we had the warmest of welcomes from the locals and of course there was live music…
…and the drinks came with what were probably the most impressive ‘nibbles’ I’ve ever seen!
Medellin Thursday – Somoloco Dance School
Thursday was a crazy day, we had a group class as well as our individual teaching sessions and then, for the first time, we went out to try our steps in public. And we made our way through the evening, there was still a lot of improvement to be made but a week ago we’d never have been able to do this.
Medellin Friday – Somoloco Dance School
And Friday – Friday was the day when it all started coming together – we could make our way through the moves and even join them up. It’s hard to express how much of an achievement it felt and we also knew that there were elements that we could use in disco back at home.
We’ve always know that dancing brings joy and yet it’s so tragically underrated in our British lifestyle. For some reason we stop dancing when we reach maturity in our 20s, it’s seen as a bit silly. If you run marathons or do crossfit or swim in rivers you’re applauded but if you tell people you dance at the weekends, they smirk. And yet you go to Colombia and see the joy of people young and old all dancing together everywhere, even outside a shopping centre at 9am on a Sunday morning.
I know which culture has it all wrong – and it isn’t the Colombians.
For us as a couple, the dancing part of our trip to Colombia forged an even deeper connection between us… a new way of communicating and understanding each other and a very romantic surrender that was utterly unexpected but totally jubilant. I think this very last moment of our very last class sums it up…
For me… Colombia enriched every single part of me – mind, body, soul… all of my senses and it’s left me bubbling with more than just joy, it’s made me feel fully alive. I’m not sure whether I’ll ever achieve this feeling again because I don’t think there’s another destination quite like it. And so now I have a question for you…
Come to Colombia with us?
Would you like to come to Colombia with us? We have the option to book a week at Somoloco dance school just for Midlifechic readers next year. Everything would be organised apart from the flights so from the moment you land at Medellin airport until the moment you’re dropped off again at the end of the week, you’d be looked after. You could come as a couple, with a friend or solo… every which way works. The cost for a week is approximately £2,200 for a couple or two people sharing a room and teacher, £1,430 if you’re travelling and learning to dance solo. That includes local transport, accommodation, teaching and some of the meals and other group activities (but not flights). The cost of living in Colombia is very low so you really wouldn’t need a lot of spending money while you’re out there. Anyway I thought we could have so much fun that it was worth asking to see if there’s enough of a demand. All I need for now is a simple indication if you’d like me to look into it further so please click the button below to let me know if it’s worth pursuing. I’m really hoping to build Midlifechic into more of a real life community over the years to come and this is my first attempt at doing that.
If you can’t wait that long, there are still two places left on Somoloco’s next dance course in Barcelona at the end of this month – details at the bottom of the page here.
Birmingham overnighter
And closer to home we have our Birmingham overnighter just for readers on Saturday 9th August. I’m hugely grateful to reader and regular commenter Elaine for working so hard to pull that together while I’ve been away and there will be a special post next Tuesday that will give you details and take bookings. We need 32 people to secure the group rate that Elaine has negotiated so please try to come if you can. It will give us a chance to discover something about the social history of Birmingham, perhaps do a bit of shopping and most importantly spend an evening chatting over dinner with a glass of wine or two for anyone who wants one.
And with that I’m retiring to the sofa to try to shake off the last of the jet lag. I’ll be back next Friday but in the meantime if you’ve made it all the way through this post, I hope I’ve managed to share a bit of the joy with you – and remind you that we’re all at a whole new stage of life. It’s there for the taking – we just have to be brave enough to step into the new.
Disclosure: ‘Medellin – a week of salsa and culture’ is not a sponsored post
Recent posts you may have missed
Wardrobe refresh – pops of spring colour
Reflecting on 2024’s midlife lessons
January catch-up – books, films, TV and fresh air
End of sale investments that I personally recommend
Winter brightness – clothes for the cusp of the year
Making midlife outfits stand out
Winter outfit building – working with texture
Midlife lately – pockets of October joy
How to make outfits more interesting
