Today it's been six months from the day I returned from my first round-the-world trip! It feels like a small eternity but still all the memories of the places, the people and the experiences are so vivid...199 days traveling around the world, about a 100 cities or towns, in 12 countries on five continents - all of them (besides London) that I had never visited before. All by myself. That may seem a lot to someone and not much to some other more hardened world explorers... But it meant the world to me.
People have asked many questions about the trip, no surprise there. So I decided to put together a "little" FAQ list:
Mid November + Helsinki... Not the best combination. But a great way to get your mind off of the cold rain and darkness is to dance your toes sore! The zouk festivals in Helsinki have been quite small but this November we had the biggest one - the 4th Helsinki Zouk Festival Nov 16-18 gathered lots of international dancers to our windy city!
There were two days of workshops with visiting teachers from Brazil, Leonardo Neves & Layssa Liebscher, and from Spain, Daniel & Leticia Estevez Lopez, as well as our resident teachers Freddy Marinho & Andressa Castelhano (BRA) and Soile Vedenpää (FIN). The workshops were pretty packed but the mood was great and I think the teachers succeeded well in accommodating the various levels of students attending the classes. Restaurant La Bamba and Etnofitness dance studio in Sörnäinen served as the workshop spaces - and the festival full pass included a hearty lunch and snacks!
In the past weeks there have been many things to celebrate and in the zouk community we love to party -especially we love birthdays! One reason for that is because we get a special birthday dance, roda (Portuguese for 'circle'). In this case it's not quite like the salsa rueda (also Spanish for 'circle') you may first think, where there is an even amount of guys and girls in a circle dancing a set of various moves which one person shouts out. On birthdays we do a roda where people gather in a circle around the person who is celebrating. So if it's a girl that's celebrating then the guys or the leaders circle around the girl; and vice versa. The objective is for the birthday girl or guy to have the most fun while the others in the circle try to "steal" that girl/guy one after another for one song.
This is a known tradition in other latin dance communities as well but it seems to be particularly strong in zouk! I've taken part in many zouk rodas around the world and in Brazil, especially in the big parties like they have for example in São Paulo it gets quite crazy when there are six or even more rodas going on at once - there people make sure they show up to the parties on their birthdays! Everybody dreams about having their birthday during a congress just for the roda, to get surrounded by all the amazing dancers from around the world!
I wanted to take this chance to post some videos of the rodas we've had in the past month here in Helsinki!
Here is one for my birthday. We took over the main floor of the weekly salsa party, "Salsa at the Cellar", at the Helsinki Salsa Academy. So in a sense it was also a little zouk demo too :) The salsa people in the audience (especially the girls, as you can imagine) were quite amazed and delighted to say the least - and I was quite the happy girl too!
My dance partner and I had had an idea for a long time to make a little zouk show, practically ever since we started. We thought it would be fun to challenge ourselves and show mainly our non-dancing friends what zouk is about.
Since I was away for over 6 months we kept postponing this but when I returned home we started to talk about it again. It seemed to be impossible to get a good idea, or a theme for the show - or enough time to practice. But then some of our friends invited us to do a show which gave us a deadline to come up with something. Finally we had only three weeks to create this "something"! So we picked a song and thought we can just wing it.. But the music inspired us and what started with "let's just freestyle some zouk to some Finnish music" turned into a nice simple choreography!
After my long trip around the world I wasn't exactly looking forward to traveling more any time soon. But I wasn't looking forward to dark & rainy autumn days in Finland either. So I booked a trip to Barcelona for mid-September for the 4th Beach Zouk & Lambada Festival.
The festival was held in Santa Susana, 60km or 1h20min train ride up from Barcelona, right on the beautiful beaches of Costa Brava, Spain. Our small "team Finland" arrived on site already a day before the event, just enough time to unwind, unpack and get a little beach time before the zouk&lambada marathon that awaited! Santa Susana is a small town, basically like one big tourist resort. There's the beach and close to it there are restaurants, shops and hotels. A little off the beach is the town centre and up on the hill there are the residential areas - we never made it that far, after all we just came there to see the sun, sea, sand and dance our feet off!
All summer thousands of people all around the world from Toronto to Melbourne, from Suriname to Singapore, have been practicing for the International Zouk Flash Mob that took place on Sunday Sep 16th. People rehearsed the same choreography and performed it flash mob style at iconic places sush as in front of the Eiffel tower, the Colosseum, on the beaches of Brazil...
There were about 100 cities in 38 countries that took part in the big event on the same day! I
was dancing with the participants of the 4th Zouk & Lambada Beach
Festival in Santa Susana, Spain. Here is my funny video of the
happening! Me and the deck chair by the pool served as the role of
videographer with my camera...
It's been a busy summer since I got back to Finland at the end of June. I've spent a lot of time with my friends and family - and back at the dance studio! The weekly zouk socials at the Opera stage in Helsinki have gone well and we wrapped up the summer season two weeks ago. Besides the Opera backyard, we've been out dancing zouk at various clubs in Helsinki, in parks and beaches all around, at the summer cottages and even at one midsummer "lavatanssit"!
Mzouk hits Helsinki
In July we had some Mzouk workshops in Helsinki with a Finnish Mzouk teacher-in-training Ossi. The course attracted quite a lot of people - it was nice to get us zoukers together during the summer!
It was the middle of June and I was reaching the end of my big trip! Actually I was also getting back to square one, to London, where this adventure started over six months earlier. I was dying to be done with the trip, I was missing my friends and family, my own bed.. my clothes :D So this was the next best thing, just one final step away from returning home! Even on the Tokyo airport (from where I flew back to London) they had a flight leaving to my home town, almost the same time as my flight to London, it was killing me!! But it wasn't all that bad - I was going to see & stay with friends in London too and dance dance dance zouk like no tomorrow!
I had to get up early in Tokyo to get to my flight and I wasn't too thrilled. Somehow I managed to fit all my stuff in my two bags and got the airport early - ready to "enjoy" another 12 hour flight. I thought I'd get some sleep but I guess I was too excited to relax enough so I just kicked back and watched a bunch of movies instead. I closed my eyes towards the end of the flight and suddenly I was in London! London, baby!
It was a Friday afternoon and I waddled with my stuff to my friend's place, changed gear and was off - determined to stay awake through the evening and kill any jetlag that was heading my way. So I went to see a zouk class at the famous Pineapple Studios. I had just flown across nine time zones and been up & traveling for about 20 hours so I didn't really feel like taking part in the class. But went to watch just out of curiosity.
Kyoto (京都市or Kyōto) is located in the central part of the Honshu island, south of Tokyo. This former imperial capital of Japan is a part of the Kyoto-Osaka-Kobe metropolitan area and a very popular tourist destination, especially know for its traditional districts and temples.
I was staying in Osaka, just less than an hour away from Kyoto, and took one day to go for a visit. I got very helpful tips from my new friend Mio from Osaka who mapped me a great route through Kyoto! So around noon I arrived from Osaka to Kyoto's Kawaramachi train station, ready to explore the city!
Hills surround this beautiful city and on the hills there are big impressive temple areas. My plan was to go discover the eastern hill and first up was the Yasaka Shrine. It's easy to find the shrine as it's just at the end of the main road - you can't miss the big, red temple gate! I passed through the colourful temple where people were ringing the big bells and continued to a beautiful park called Maruyama Koen. I can just imagine how during spring it's covered with cherry trees blossoming. I heard that the park was also used in the movie Memoirs of a Geisha.
After a week of being totally amazed by Tokyo I was exited to go see another Japanese city, Osaka! Ōsaka, or 大阪, is a part of the Kyoto-Osaka-Kobe metropolitan area of close to 20 million people. I'm starting to wonder how many of the world's biggest cities are located in Japan....!?!
It was easy to decide how to get from Tokyo to Osaka: with the Shinkansen train (the bullet train), yay! I had popped by the Tokyo train station before my departure day to check out the place so I would know how to get to 1) the right station and 2) the right platform. There are soooo many stations, terminals, platforms, entrances, escalators and underground passages that it's quite easy to get lost! But I made it! Just a little problem with my tickets at the automatic gates but no worries since there's always lots of helpful staff around!
The noses of the trains look so
funny, some had even longer noses than this one, over 10m!
Believe it or not, you can do lots of latin dancing in Japan, even zouk! And not just in Tokyo but in various locations in the country. I was excited to visit some other cities beyond Tokyo in my quest to find out how is Japanese zouk and extended my time in Japan a couple days just for that :) Tokyo dance scene information follows right below, scroll down for Osaka and Kyoto!
Burning the floor in Tokyo
I didn't know anything about the Japanese zouk scene but am lucky to have friends around the world who used their contacts to find some places and parties for me! There are in fact a few monthly zouk events where the local dancers gather up. I was in town for the “first Saturday of the month” party, also know as Utage zouk, ar the G-Box dance studio in Ebisu. I arrived there on time, at 8.30pm when the party started. There wasn't a whole lot of people then but soon enough the place filled up and was packed with 30 or more dancers from about 9.30pm onwards!
